(THE COLLEGE FIX) -- The current summer heat wave is due to climate change, a University of Pennsylvania professor told CNN.

Presidential Distinguished Professor Michael Mann said that it is currently extremely hot this week due to climate change. However, future problems can be prevented “by getting off fossil fuels.”

“This is a glimpse of not only what our future will look like, but in fact, it will look quite a bit worse than this,” Professor Mann told CNN host Brianna Keilar during an interview Monday.

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The Ten Commandments stand at the 21st annual Bible Reading Marathon in Stuart, Florida, on Friday, Nov. 12, 2021. (Photo by Joe Kovacs)

(AP) -- Louisiana has become the first state to require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom under a bill signed into law by Republican Gov. Jeff Landry on Wednesday.

The GOP-drafted legislation mandates that a poster-sized display of the Ten Commandments in “large, easily readable font” be required in all public classrooms, from kindergarten to state-funded universities. Although the bill did not receive final approval from Landry, the time for gubernatorial action — to sign or veto the bill — has lapsed.

Opponents question the law’s constitutionality, warning that lawsuits are likely to follow. Proponents say the purpose of the measure is not solely religious, but that it has historical significance. In the law’s language, the Ten Commandments are described as “foundational documents of our state and national government.”

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A so-called "science' magazine has turned itself into an expert on education, admitting that homeschooling works, but demanding federal oversight, and rules, for parents who teach their own children.

A report from Breitbart identified the magazine as "Scientific American," a publication that often takes left-leaning positions.

It now is not only calling for federal rules for homeschooling, but even "background" checks for parents.

The magazine's agenda came in a recent newsletter in which it cited information from the National Center for Education Statistics, which confirmed 1.5 million American children were homeschooled during the 2019 time period.

Homeschooling activity actually is surging across the U.S.

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"The newsletter admits that homeschooled children have excelled, going on to win national spelling bees, even pointing to famed Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős, who was homeschooled by his mother," the report said.

But the magazine complained "most states don’t require the same assessment of homeschooled kids that are required for their public school peers. Parents are not required to have an education themselves to direct instruction, and in most states, no one checks to see that children are receiving an education at all. In the worst cases, homeschooling can hide abuse."

The commentary said, "homeschool parents should be required to undergo a background check — the same as K-12 teachers."

And, the magazine insisted, "Homeschool instructors could be required to submit documents every year to their local school district or to a state agency to show that their children are learning."

The report noted actually NCES documents that most homeschooling is done to battle "toxic school environments and a lack of moral instruction."

It explained, "Eighty percent of homeschoolers said they homeschool because they have a concern about school environment (which could include safety, drugs, negative peer pressure, or other issues), 75 percent said they desire to provide moral instruction, another 75 percent said they want to put an emphasis on family life together, and 59 percent said they have a desire to provide religious instruction. Further, nearly three quarters, 73 percent, said they homeschool because they have a dissatisfaction with the academic instruction at other schools. To further demonstrate that point, the U.S. Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress testing found that just 32 percent of fourth graders read at or above proficiency for their grade level in 2022."

Public schools across America today, in fact, are facing a multitude of fights with parents as leftists embedded in staff and faculty impose leftist ideologies of "diversity, equity, inclusion," as well as Black Lives Matter, LGBT and "environmental justice." In extreme cases, some schools allow teachers to encourage students to declare they are transgender, and then conceal such influences from parents.

"In 2023, for example, the Los Angeles Unified School District hosted a 'Rainbow Club,' to teach kids as young as five years old about LGBT-related topics, and there has been controversy nationwide about what some describe as 'pornographic' books in schools,," the report noted.

HeadlineUSA characterized the magazine's demands as declaring "war" on homeschooling.

It explained, "To solve the non-existent problem, the leftists who work at the magazine said that 'homeschooling should be subject to some basic federal mandates'" and those background checks should be mandatory.

The Washington Examiner described the magazine as "left-leaning legacy" publication, and said, "While the implication of what the Scientific American editors advocated appears to be government control over homeschool curriculums and practices, one of the most oft-cited reasons families decide to homeschool is to get their children out of government-run schools."

WND previously reported when Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Bartholet complained publicly about, "The Risks of Homeschooling."

She has claimed that homeschooling deprives children of their right to a "meaningful education."

She explained, it is "important that children grow up exposed to community values, social values, democratic values, ideas about nondiscrimination and tolerance of other people's viewpoints."

PJ Media, at the time, commented: "In other words, she knows that homeschooled children are being taught to think for themselves, and she won't stand for it."

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Anti-Israel protests at Columbia University on Sunday, April 21, 2024

[Editor's note: This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire.]

By Paul Sperry
Real Clear Wire

Echoing the Muslim prophet Muhammad, Professor Hatem Bazian, a tenured University of California, Berkeley professor, told his fellow Muslims: “The Day of Judgment will never happen until you fight the Jews.”

At the Santa Clara conference sponsored by the American Muslim Alliance, Bazian exhorted the crowd: “They are on the west side of the river, which is the Jordan River, and you’re on the east side until the trees and the stones will say, ‘Oh Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill him!’ And that’s in the Hadith [the sayings and deeds of Muhammad] about this. This is a future battle before the Day of Judgment.”

Bazian’s threatening prophecy from 1999 might be lost to history but for the central role he has been playing in the anti-Israel protests that have erupted at college campuses. Two groups he helped create, Students for Justice in Palestine and American Muslims for Palestine, have been instrumental in organizing the demonstrations. In recent months he has visited the encampments from coast to coast, exhorting students to condemn Israel for launching counterstrikes in Gaza after marauding Hamas terrorists attacked and slaughtered more than 1,200 Israelis in October and took hundreds of others captive, including several Americans. Bazian has urged students to call on administrators and national leaders to protect Palestinian civilians in Gaza, whom he claims are victims of a “genocide” carried out by the Israeli government.

Although many opponents of Israel’s war against Hamas deny that their movement is tied to antisemitism, critics say Bazian’s deep involvement in the protests and his long history of inflammatory rhetoric against the Jewish people puts that claim in doubt. “The campus unrest is being driven by people with a very troubling past,” said Jon Schanzer, a former U.S. Treasury counterterrorism official. “They’re trying to legitimize Hamas.”

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Drawing on a wide array of public records, RealClearInvestigations found that Bazian has been agitating against Jews and Israel on college campuses for decades. His 1999 exhortation of Holy War between Muslims and Jews was part of a larger pattern of words and deeds in which he sought to radicalize young Americans against the Jewish people. Bazian’s history – and the top place he holds in the ongoing turmoil – also reveal the key role he’s long planned for America’s institutions of higher learning to play in mainstreaming and spreading ideas that many people consider hateful.

A Palestinian immigrant, Bazian was born in the West Bank town of Nablus and attended high school in Jordan. He graduated from San Francisco State University and then moved to Berkeley, where he chairs the Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project.

Upon arriving at Berkeley in 1993, Bazian helped start the first college chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine – whose national organization says it supports more than 350 “Palestinian solidarity organizations.” In 2006, he co-founded its umbrella organization, American Muslims for Palestine. “We support campus activism through Students for Justice in Palestine,” AMP states on its website.

“AMP is directly involved in the campus chaos,” Schanzer said, by helping coordinate protests at colleges where its SJP outposts operate. AMP provides funding and guidance for the chapters for, among other things, holding anti-Israel “teach-ins,” erecting pro-Palestinian tables, crafting media “talking points,” and creating flyers and placards for the campus encampments and occupations that demonize Israel and sanitize Hamas atrocities as “resistance.”

As AMP’s chairman, Bazian has visited several encampments, including at the University of Pennsylvania, San Diego State University, UC-San Diego, University of San Francisco and UC-Berkeley, where his acolytes have set up a “Gaza Solidarity Camp.” RCI’s review of videos posted on social media of his encampment talks reveals he’s instructed students not to be “nice” while protesting, because he said being polite won’t get the attention of college administrators or President Biden, whom he demands divest from Israel and pressure Israel to withdraw from Gaza.

Meanwhile, his organization, which employs a full-time campus outreach coordinator, is under both federal and state investigation for ties to Hamas, and is also a defendant in a major new lawsuit brought by survivors of the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack.

A Richardson, Texas-based lawyer representing Bazian and AMP did not reply to requests for comment. After also reaching out to Bazian directly, RCI’s messages went unanswered. Bazian has a history of seeming to endorse, or even call for, violence, and then denying doing so. In 2004, while Hamas was leading a deadly resistance, or “intifada,” in Israel that included suicide bombers, Bazian reportedly called for an “intifada” inside America while addressing a largely Muslim crowd at an anti-Iraq war rally.

“Are you angry? Are you angry?! Well, we’ve been watching intifada in Palestine,” Bazian shouted. “How come we don’t have an intifada in this country?”

“They’re going to say [I’m] some Palestinian being radical – well, you haven’t seen radicalism yet,” he added. “It’s about time we have an intifada in this country!”

He later claimed his remarks were meant to incite only a “political intifada” inside this country, not violent revolt. Last month, while rallying protestors at a University of San Francisco encampment, Bazian again called  for “intifada,” asking students, “Can you all say intifada?”

“Intifada!” protesters shouted back.

Speaking to students gathered outside tents at the same USF rally, Bazian encouraged the forceful taking and “holding” of campus buildings as protesters did at Columbia University before New York police stormed the facility and removed them. Recruiting new protesters, he bellowed, “Let me say we welcome agitators for justice. We celebrate courage and continue to make changes because a free Palestine is a reality that is waiting to be actualized. Free Palestine! Don’t let anyone stop you from making history!”

Student protesters have echoed his rhetoric that Hamas has the right to “resist” Israel by resorting to violence.

On Oct. 7 – the same day as the horrific attacks on Israel which included the murder of hundreds of innocent youths attending a music festival – the flagship Berkeley chapter of Students for Justice In Palestine released a statement with SJP chapters at dozens of other colleges pledging their “unwavering support of the resistance in Gaza … We stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters in Palestine.” Bazian’s flagship group made it clear it was honoring “our comrades in blood and arms” fighting on the ground in Gaza – that is, Hamas – and warned that “what is coming is greater. Victory or martyrdom.”

Parroting Hamas’ rhetoric for annihilating Israel, they then pronounced: “From River to Sea, glory to the Palestinian resistance and glory to our martyrs.” Berkeley’s SJP chapter later held a vigil for “martyrs in Palestine” killed during and after the bloody anti-Israel incursion.

According to an FBI memo, one of the founders of Hamas has stated, “Hamas is a Palestinian Jihad movement that strives for the liberation of all Palestine, from the [Mediterranean] sea to the river [Jordan], from the north to the south,” a goal that would erase Israel from the map.

An NPR report earlier this month on the meaning of intifada – an Arabic word that can mean to “shake off” or “uprising” – quoted people who say it is inextricably related to violence and those who say it is not.

Basil Rodriguez, whom NPR identified as a Palestinian American graduate student at Columbia, told the network: “For me, it just speaks to liberation. To free Palestine from the [Israeli] apartheid regime, and the military occupation. For me it calls for freedom and for change.”

Eliana Goldin, whom NPR identified as a Jewish undergraduate and leader of a pro-Israel group at Columbia, said “The word ‘intifada’ was only associated with death and terrorism and destruction. So ‘intifada’ still feels just as charged as if someone were to say Holocaust. Or if someone were to mention any sort of catastrophe that happened against a people that you consider yourself a part of.”

Schanzer, the former Treasury official, agreed. “When they’re calling for an ‘intifada,’ they’re calling for a violent uprising,” he said. “These are things we commonly associate with Hamas rhetoric.”

The next day, Oct. 8, while pockets of Hamas terrorists inside Israel’s borders were still killing, raping, and kidnapping civilians, the National Students for Justice in Palestine, which is controlled by the AMP, distributed a “Resistance Toolkit” that celebrated Hamas’ war crimes as “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance: Across land, air and sea, our people have broken down the artificial barriers” separating Gaza from Israel.

Adopting Bazian’s language about “actualiz[ing]” the creation of a Palestinian state, the toolkit continued to exalt Hamas: “Our people are actualizing revolution. Palestine will be liberated from the river to the sea.” By our people, it meant “our people back home” in Gaza.

Then the toolkit rationalized Hamas’ brutal terrorist tactics, arguing “there is no ‘right’ way for Palestinians to fight.” It added that the Israelis who were murdered were not “civilians” and that their “death falls solely on the zionist entity.”

The toolkit went on to praise the “ingenuity” of Hamas terrorists for capturing an Israeli bulldozer and using it “to breach the illegitimate border fence” and for “neutraliz[ing]” the barrier “in hours.”

“This action of resistance shatters the illusion of Israel as an impenetrable, indestructible entity,” the five-page document gushed while marveling at the “large-scale” battle marshaled by Hamas, which it noted was ongoing. “The resistance fighters are still launching new attacks into [Israel].”

Advocating further violence, the NSJP toolkit advised students that liberating Palestine “requires confrontation by any means necessary” — including “armed struggle,” not just slogans and rallies, which it asserted is “legitimate.” It provided templates of pro-Hamas graphics for student protesters to use for campus posters and other propaganda, including one depicting the Hamas terrorists paragliding into Israel to carry out their mass slaughter.

“We will also be having a ‘how to organize a protest,’ including roles, security, media training, and more, on the national call-in meeting on Oct. 9,” it advised.

In a chilling closing remark, NSJP confirmed it wasn’t just supporting from afar the Oct. 7 actions of Hamas – a specially designated terrorist organization – but was actually a “part” of its movement. “We as Palestinian students in exile are PART of this movement, not [just] in solidarity with this movement,” NSJP averred.

The group’s toolkit spread through dorm rooms across the country thanks to social media, and soon anti-Israel protests broke out at major universities using the tactics and propaganda suggested by NSJP. For example:

• Protesters at Tufts University called the terrorists “liberation fighters paragliding into occupied territory,” noting that Hamas had shown “the creativity necessary to take back stolen land.”

• The rabble at Columbia University blamed Israel for the terror attacks, justifying the murder of women and children as provoked by Israeli “oppression.” Demonstrators could be heard chanting support for their “friends and brothers in Hamas,” and actually called on the terrorists to attack Israel again. “Never forget the 7th of October,” some taunted Jewish students. “That will happen … 10,000 more times!” The Anti-Defamation League, moreover, recorded explicit support for terrorism and violence at the Columbia encampment on April 17, when one protestor declared: “We are Hamas,” while others chanted: “Al-Qassam [the name of Hamas’ military wing] you make us proud, kill another [Israeli] soldier now!”

• At several other colleges, SJP-influenced protests featured chants such as “Resistance is justified” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” reflecting the same anti-Israel propaganda distributed by the Berkeley chapter of SJP in the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7.

Such militancy is the culmination of decades of grooming by Bazian. In a speech at the 2011 AMP conference in Chicago, he predicted college campuses would be ground zero in the battle for the “Palestine movement.” “The university is going to be the frontline and the pro-Israelis know this,” Bazian said. To that end, AMP expanded its operations on college campuses by founding the National Students for Justice in Palestine to better organize and fund chapters and recruit pro-Palestinian activists.

Some FBI veterans who have investigated the Hamas network of front groups in America say hardcore Muslim leaders like Bazian are brainwashing students into thinking they are part of a heroic struggle for “freedom,” but are merely co-opting them for their own anti-Jewish holy war.

“Bazian and other Muslim organizers keep framing these campus protests as a ‘human-rights’ struggle, when it’s clearly just another front in their religious war,” said former special FBI counterterrorism agent John Guandolo. “This isn’t about freeing Gaza or protecting Palestinian civilians,” he added. “This is about Islam and their hatred of Jews and fulfilling their scriptural commands. This is jihad.”

By hiding the religious element, he said, Bazian has managed to create an army of anti-Israel radicals at several hundred campuses across the country, many of whom are not even Muslim. He says they are being used as proxies in Hamas’ jihad, or holy war, against their Islamic enemy: the Jews. “Bazian is a senior leader in the jihadi movement in America,” Guandolo said. “He’s not on campus for the Chick-fil-A.”

A federal lawsuit recently filed by Oct. 7 families against AMP and NSJP alleges they “are not innocent advocacy groups, but rather the propaganda arm of a terrorist organization operating in plain sight” and “provide ongoing, continuous, systematic and material support for Hamas.” Acting as “agents” of Hamas in America, it claims, they are central command for the pro-Hamas campus protests and pose a dangerous threat to Jews in America.

It is illegal to provide material support to Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization that was founded in 1988 in the Gaza Strip to establish an “Islamic Palestinian State that encompasses Israel, the West Bank and Gaza,” according to the 51-page internal FBI memo. Its covenants call for jihad to achieve the goal of destroying the Jewish state, while asserting this “armed struggle” against Jews is the duty of every Muslim. The FBI memo, written in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, noted that the Hamas leadership has launched several bloody “intifadas” targeting the Jewish people and told Palestinians they can “do whatever they want against the brothers of monkeys and pigs,” a phrase borrowed from the Muslim holy book the Quran to describe Jews.

In a previous statement, Bazian dismissed the lawsuit as “an Islamophobic text reeking in anti-Palestinian racism,” while his attorney Christy Jump insisted, “AMP operates fully within the laws of the United States.”

However, state and federal investigators are looking into whether Bazian’s AMP has crossed the line between legal activism and material support for terrorism. Virginia’s attorney general is investigating allegations AMP “may have used funds raised for impermissible purposes under state law, including benefiting or providing support to a terrorist organization,” referring to Hamas. AMP has denied the allegations and called them “defamatory.”

AMP’s troubles deepened last month when the House Oversight Committee launched a probe into AMP and its sister organization, the National Students for Justice in Palestine, over their allegedly “substantial ties to Hamas.” House investigators subpoenaed AMP for all documents and communications related to its funding of SJP’s college hubs and its support for Hamas and the Oct. 7 massacre. AMP was told to comply with the order by June 12. Asked if the nonprofit group would cooperate, Jump did not respond.

The federal lawsuit alleges AMP and NSJP are radicalizing students by exploiting their passions for “justice” and “human rights” in the Middle East, while hiding from them their religious extremism and true motive of targeting Jews in general.

“Through NSJP, AMP uses propaganda to intimidate, convince and recruit uninformed, misguided and impressionable college students to serve as foot soldiers for Hamas on campus and beyond,” according to the court filing. Part of their goal, it alleges, is to “establish an environment where violence against Jews could be construed as acceptable.”

Others worry they are grooming junior terrorists and that their mass movement across campuses, which is becoming increasingly violent, could end in armed confrontation on U.S. soil.

“When college students see that their marches and protests aren’t achieving their goals [of a ceasefire in Gaza and divestment from Israel], they may consider their next steps – which will be influenced by the company they have been keeping,” warned Steven Stalinsky, executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute in Washington, D.C.

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Stacy Davis Gates of the Chicago Teachers Union

By Harold Hutchison
Daily Caller News Foundation

The president of the Chicago Teachers Union claimed during a radio interview that aired Sunday that conservatives don’t want black children to learn how to read.

Stacy Davis Gates made an appearance on WBBM 780 AM to defend the union’s contract demands. Gates claimed that conservatives who expressed criticism of the demands “don’t even want black children to be able to read.”

“Remember, these same conservatives are the conservatives who probably would have been championing black codes, you know, during reconstruction or thereafter,” she said. “So, forgive me again if conservatives pushing back on educating immigrant children, black children, children who live in poverty, doesn’t make my anxiety go up. That’s what they’re supposed to say. That is literally a part of the oath that they take to be right wing.”

LISTEN:

The union’s demands include a number of climate-related provisions including electric school buses, expanded use of heat pumps and solar panels and the creation of “climate champion” positions to organize relevant initiatives and activities. The list could cost upward of $13.9 billion, according to an estimate by the Illinois Policy Institute.

The union also called for the city’s board of education to work with the city to provide more affordable housing units, with priority being given to Chicago Public School families, according to IPI.

LISTEN to Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates absurdly tell a news radio host that conservatives do not want Black children to read:

"Conservatives don’t even want Black children to be able to read. Remember, these same conservatives are the conservatives who… pic.twitter.com/GacLgyXetL

— Nicki Neily (@nickineily) June 18, 2024

“It does mean something when there are 20,000 classified unhoused young people in this city, because it means a lack of stability for our city,” Gates said. “That’s why we are going to put forward proposals that will compel the [Chicago Housing Authority] to move those families to the top of the list and have a timeline to put them in homes.”

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Testing results for 2023 showed that about 83% of CPS students were not proficient in math, while nearly 75% could not read at grade level, according to IPI.

“If anyone knows about students not being to be able to read, it’s the Chicago Teachers Union. Federal statistics reveal that 85 percent of Black and 78 percent of Hispanic 4th graders in CPS are not proficient in reading, even though the district has spent nearly $30K per child this year,” Nicki Neily, president and founder of Parents Defending Education, said in a statement provided to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Ms. Gates heads the union that said in 2020 ‘the push to reopen schools is rooted in racism, sexism, and misogyny’ – despite the fact that school closures disproportionately hurt the low-income students she claims to care about. Ms. Gates should spend less time stoking division among residents and more time getting her members to actually teach children.”

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Twenty-three sets of twins graduated in 2024 from Pollard Middle School in Needham, Massachusetts. (Photo by Principal Tamantha Bibbo)

(FOX NEWS) -- A Massachusetts middle school recently celebrated its eighth-grade "moving up" ceremony for its outgoing students, including a remarkable 23 sets of twins.

Pollard Middle School, in Needham, Massachusetts, has a fairly large student body, Principal Tamantha Bibbo told the Associated Press. But the sheer number of twins in this year's eighth-grade class is "quite unusual," she said.

"We typically have anywhere from five to 10 sets at most," Bibbo told the AP. "Given our numbers, we have approximately 450 to 500 children in each grade, so this was extraordinarily high."

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For the third time in just recent weeks, Joe Biden's "sex" agenda has crashed and burned when it has faced a federal judge.

The newest rejection of his rewrite to the decades-old Title IX law that changes the definition of "sex" to "gender identity" or ideology, comes from a judge in Kentucky who, in his preliminary injunction, protected women in Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, Virginia and Weste Virginia.

Biden's Department of Education has redefined "sex" from the 1972 law to include all sorts of alternative sexual ideologies, insisting that's what Congress meant when it approved a ban on discrimination against men or women in school activities at the time.

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Biden's rules would force biological women to share private spaces, like showers and locker rooms, with gender-confused biological males.

"The radical rewrite of Title IX regulations eradicates privacy, safety, and fairness for biological women and girls. The lawsuits against forcing gender ideology in education have merit and the Biden administration’s obsession with erasing women must stop," explained Liberty Counsel chief Mat Staver.

Just days ago, a Louisiana judge granted a similar injunction for the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana and Idaho, and a Texas judge ruled for his state earlier.

According to Liberty Counsel's report, "These injunctions prevent the updated rules from taking effect in these 11 states while litigation continues in each case to determine permanent decisions. The move responsible for the multitude of lawsuits came April 29 when the DOE published the Title IX Final Rule on the Federal Register, which expanded the definition of 'sex' and 'sex discrimination' to include 'gender identity' and 'sexual orientation' as protected categories against discrimination."

That change in the law, without approval from Congress, is supposed to hit the books in August.

The ruling is from Judge Danny C. Reeves.

He found, "Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 was intended to level the playing field between men and women in education. The statute tells us that no person shall be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance 'on the basis of sex.' However, the Department of Education seeks to derail deeply rooted law with a Final Rule that is set to go into effect on August 1, 2024. At bottom, the Department would turn Title IX on its head by redefining 'sex' to include 'gender identity.' But 'sex' and 'gender identity' do not mean the same thing. The Department’s interpretation conflicts with the plain language of Title IX and therefore exceeds its authority to promulgate regulations under that statute. This Court is not persuaded by the Department’s reliance on the Supreme Court’s decision Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, —a case that was explicitly limited to the context of employment discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act…:"

WND reported earlier when the Louisiana ruling was released that the judge pointed out, "Nothing in the statute expressly prohibits discrimination based on gender identity or other unexpressed grounds. And where Title IX allows for differentiation based on sex due to biological differences—such as intimate facilities and athletic teams—recipients may treat persons in accordance with their biological sex without regard to subjective gender identity."

He said, "Title IX explicitly appreciates the innate biological variation between men and women that occasionally warrants differentiation—and even separation—to preserve educational opportunities and to promote respect for both sexes. Rather than promote the equal opportunity, dignity, and respect that Title IX demands for both biological sexes, Defendants’ Guidance Documents do the opposite in an effort to advance an agenda wholly divorced from the text, structure, and contemporary context of Title IX."

Further, he noted, "Not to mention, recipients of Title IX funding—including Texas schools—will face an impossible choice: revise policies in compliance with the Guidance Documents but in contravention of state law or face the loss of substantial funding. Thus, to allow Defendants’ unlawful action to stand would be to functionally rewrite Title IX in a way that shockingly transforms American education and usurps a major question from Congress. That is not how our democratic system functions."

That ruling said when the 1972 law was adopted, and refers to "sex," it "carried an unambiguously binary meaning."

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By Owen Klinsky
Daily Caller News Foundation

A chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) called for “D****” – presumably a censored version of the word “death” – to America and Israel while publicizing their disruption of an Ivy League commencement Sunday.

The Upper Valley Democratic Socialists of America (UVDSA) – a chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) – participated in a pro-Palestinian demonstration at Dartmouth College’s commencement on Sunday, with “several” graduating seniors walking out of the ceremony as college President Sian Leah Beilock began her speech, according to the UVDSA Instagram. The organization then posted several images of the protests, ending the photo’s caption with the words “Palestine will be freed in our lifetime. D**** to America and Israel.”

However, the organization appears to have edited the caption to remove that language shortly after the DCNF contacted it for comment.

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These students proceeded to join a number of UVDSA protesters on the college’s main quad, where they marched with their “comrades,” held up political signs – including one that read “Remember the Martyrs” – and used megaphones to disrupt the commencement address and The Dartmouth, a student newspaper. as well as eyewitnesses who spoke with the Daily Caller News Foundation.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Upper Valley DSA (@uvdsa)

“I wasn’t able to hear exactly what was being chanted, but it seemed like their intention was more geared towards disrupting the event rather than expressing a specific message,” graduating senior Miller Hawkesby told the DCNF. “I was disappointed. While I understand that the protestors are very passionate about their cause and felt the need to cause disruptions to provoke a meaningful response from our administration, in my opinion, commencement was the wrong time and place.”

“Throughout the graduation ceremony, I heard what seemed to be a group of protestors circling the crowd and the stage. They had megaphones, and were shouting very rhythmic chants. Even when I could not hear the exact words they were saying, their angry, passionate tones were clearly perceived,” graduating senior Elliot Kim told the DCNF.

The UVDSA appeared to call for the destruction of Israel and the United States in an Instagram post documenting the protest.

“We were honored to march with our comrades in the GOLD Palestine Caucus at their picket of commencement yesterday. Their protest was joined by several graduating seniors who walked out of commencement as president Beilock began her speech,” the original caption stated. “Faculty, staff, students, and community members joined in demanding that the college divest from apartheid and genocide. Palestine will be freed in our lifetime. D**** to America and Israel.”

Some Dartmouth students found the UVDSA’s violent Instagram caption “offensive.”

“The language they [UVDSA] used is deeply disturbing and disgusting. We are lucky enough to live in a country that tolerates even the offensive language advocating for its own demise. I think the UVDSA would be hard-pressed to find another country throughout history, especially a socialist one, that would allow for such a disturbing statement,” Malcolm Mahoney, a member of Dartmouth’s Class of 2026, told the DCNF.

There have been protests at over 140 college campuses since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7 killed more than 1,200 people.

“The post closes with ‘Death to America and Israel’… I think [the caption] is a pretty good indication as to how DSA views this conflict and our country, which is particularly scary because DSA is affiliated with some members of congress,” said Dartmouth Class of 2026 member John Coleman.

The UVDSA and Dartmouth College did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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(THE COLLEGE FIX) -- A late 2022 headline from the Associated Press reads “Across vast Muslim world, LGBTQ people remain marginalized.”

The Guardian reports that in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sudan, and Yemen, sodomy is a capital offense … while in Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Qatar, Somalia, and Syria the act will land you in jail.

And in the Gaza Strip and West Bank — “Palestine” for all intents and purposes — Reason notes LGBTQ individuals “face an extraordinary level of persecution, persecution that may result in a years-long prison sentence or even death.”

Read the full story ›

(CBN NEWS) -- For the millions of people around the world who live with the learning disability known as dyslexia, connecting to God's Word can be tough and quite often discouraging, but a special feature provided by YouVersion is changing all that.

Chris Vaughn is a YouVersion team member who has struggled with reading because of his dyslexia. After using an OpenDyslexic font in other apps and experiencing improvement, Vaughn wanted to make it available in the YouVersion Bible App.

"I've always struggled with reading comprehension," said Vaughn. "It has been a source of shame, but having YouVersion care about my needs has helped me feel seen and supported."

Read the full story ›

[Editor's note: This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire.]

By Adam Andrzejewski
Real Clear Wire

Topline: Billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars flow into Harvard University, Brown University and Indiana University of Pennsylvania, but that didn’t stop the three schools from supplementing their funds with nearly $10 million in combined foreign gifts from the “State of Palestine.”

Key facts: A new report from OpenTheBooks.com revealed that between 2017 and 2023, IUP accepted $7.3 million from Palestine, Harvard got $1.6 million, Brown took in $643,000.

OpenTheBooks’ auditors previously reported the significant amount taxpayers spend to subsidize  Ivy League schools. Harvard received $3.3 billion in federal grants and contracts from 2018 to 2022, and Brown received $1.2 billion. IUP is a public school operating with Pennsylvania state money.

Neither the U.S. nor the United Nations acknowledges the existence of the “State of Palestine.” Brown, Harvard and IUP have decided to play by their own rules, even though they accept U.S. taxpayer money.

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Brown used some of its Palestinian funds to hire Beshara Doumani as its first professor of “Palestinian Studies.” The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis  reports that the department’s lectures center around “antisemitic conspiracy theories and gross misinformation about Jewish history and identity.”

During the period, Doumani was granted leave to run the West Bank’s Birzeit University, whose employee union praised Hamas terrorists for standing “boldly in the face of colonial fascism” when slaughtering innocent Israelis on Oct. 7 and Hamas is the largest student group on campus.

This April, Brown was one of the first and only universities to give in to pro-Palestine student protestors’ demands of considering divestment from Israel.

Most of IUP’s gifts went to pay tuition and fees for Palestinian students in the school’s business PhD and MBA programs at Arab American University in the West Bank.

Harvard’s Palestinian funds were unrestricted, so there are no federal records of how the money was spent.

Harvard’s François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights has run programs with Birzeit University, including courses like “The Settler Colonial Determinants of Health.”

Background: The Palestinian “gifts” are just one piece of the larger influence the Middle East wields over U.S. higher education.

In the last 40 years, $1 on every $4 of foreign gifts and grants to American universities has come from four Middle Eastern nations: Qatar ($5.2 billion), Saudi Arabia ($3 billion), United Arab Emirates ($1.3 billion) and Kuwait ($860 million).

Summary: U.S. taxpayer money should be supporting institutions that advance our national values, not those that accept money from groups terrorizing our country’s allies, and sowing antisemitism on college campuses.

The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com

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[Editor's note: This story originally was published by Live Action News.]

By Cassie Fiano-Chesser
Live Action News

An investigation has found that a public school teacher in New Hampshire was fired after requesting sick leave, during which the teacher actually took a student to get an abortion.

Documents released by the New Hampshire Department of Education revealed that the teacher had been “counseling” the student — both names were redacted — for several weeks about an unexpected pregnancy. The situation was originally referenced by Education Commissioner Frank Edelbut in an April op-ed, where he referenced numerous concerns expressed by teachers and parents alike. In the op-ed, he asked how the department should react “when, allegedly, an educator lies by calling in sick so they can take a student – without parental knowledge – to get an abortion. Should we turn a blind eye?”

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Boston Globe reporter Steven Porter eyed the accusation with skepticism. “[Edelbut] alluded also to an eye-catching allegation about abortion, suggesting that an educator had been accused of calling in sick to take a student to terminate a pregnancy without the student’s parents knowing,” Porter said. “Was that accusation found to be true? He did not say.”

In May, documents were released confirming that the abortion scenario did, in fact, happen.

“[T]hey had been conversing with the student for 2.5 weeks regarding the medical appointment,” the investigation said. “[The teacher] told the student to determine how far along they were (and assisted them) so the student knew what options they’d have available.” Additionally, the teacher selected the facility for the student, and drove her there.

While the report does not specify whether or not the student was a minor, New Hampshire law states that parents must be notified 48 hours before a minor gets an abortion. Lawmakers have tried recently to enshrine abortion as a constitutional right in the state, but those attempts have repeatedly failed.

In a statement to the New Hampshire Journal, state legislators expressed shock that the secret abortion happened. Yet this scenario might not be as unusual as parents would hope; a Michigan school board member (in a state that is currently attempting to get rid of its parental consent law) recently suggested that teachers should be allowed to refer their students for abortions without their parents’ knowledge. The board member stated that it was a good idea to “leave[] the interests of the students [in] the hands of our teachers that can make the best decision for them.”

New Hampshire State Rep. Erica Layon said in reaction to the news, “I am horrified to hear that a teacher in our New Hampshire schools felt the right way to help a pregnant student who felt unsupported in her pregnancy was to research abortion facilities and call out sick to take a student to an abortion rather than to help her speak with her parents and find support from her family.”

She added, “By taking the rightful place of that student’s parents, this teacher denied her family the opportunity to step up and support her. Undermining families should not be taken lightly, and assuming the worst of parents is a dangerous precedent.”

[Editor's note: This story originally was published by Live Action News.]

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The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty has announced it is challenging a scholarship program in the Beloit, Wisconsin, school district for being racist and discriminatory.

"The district's race-based GYO program is patently unconstitutional and illegal under decades-old United States Supreme Court precedent and other laws," explained WILL associate counsel Cara Tolliver.

"Citizens ought to demand more from their elected government officials—even more so for those charged with the care and education of children. Given the ongoing teacher shortage, the district should be welcoming all qualified scholarship candidates, not foreclosing teaching incentives on the irrelevant and unlawful basis of a human being’s skin pigmentation or ethnic make-up."

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At issue, WILL reported, is the district's "Grow Your Own Multicultural Teacher Scholarship Program."

"According to numerous publicly available documents and other materials, the district solicits contributions from employees and board members to fund racially discriminatory teaching scholarships for students and staff. GYO scholars receive up to $20,000 ($5,000 per year for four years) in addition to mentoring services."

The program, however, has a racist agenda.

"The district uses the scholarships to train and recruit new 'teacher[s] who look like' certain students, and so the program extends only to members of certain racial minority groups preferred by the district," WILL explained.

"The district’s race-based GYO program violates numerous anti-discrimination prohibitions, including the United States Constitution and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. WILL warns of further action if the district insists on maintaining this unlawful program."

The report explained the scholarship scheme is part of the district's commitment "to ensure a diverse professional teaching workforce” so that students can “see[] and be[] taught by a teacher who looks like them."

The program's privileged characteristics are "Black/African American,” “Native American/Alaskan,” “Asian,” and “Hispanic/Latinx.”

The legal team documented further that the school uses public resources, time and employees in running the program.

"In fact, the district solicits funding from its employees and Board members through direct payroll deductions and other available options and has offered incentives for paid-time-off to staff members who donate to the GYO fund," it reported.

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By Robert Schmad
Daily Caller News Foundation

A Democrat running for local office in Texas was arrested and charged with a felony for allegedly creating social media accounts to post fake racist attacks against himself, local outlets reported.

Taral Patel, the Democratic nominee for Fort Bend County Precinct 3 commissioner, in September 2023 made a post to his Facebook account claiming that his “Republican opponents supporters’ decide[d] to hurl #racist, #anti-immigrant, #Hinduphobic, or otherwise disgusting insults,” attaching screenshots allegedly showing prejudiced statements made by residents of the county. The racist messages were eventually traced back to Patel following an investigation conducted by the Fort Bend County District Attorney’s office and the Texas Rangers, the Houston Chronicle reported.

“We don’t need more sand negroid subhumans who smell like curry and filth in our country,” one comment flagged by Patel reads. “If I see you wearing that dot on your head, I’ll wipe it off myself,” another reads.

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Patel’s campaign has garnered endorsements from high-profile elected Democrats like  Colorado Gov. Jared Polis and Texas Rep. Joaquin Castro, according to his campaign website. The website also states that President Joe Biden appointed Patel to serve in the Office of White House Liaison during which time he says he was “a key member” of the White House Asian American Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Committee.

Taral Patel

Republican Commissioner Andy Meyers, who Patel is running against, initially suspected foul play when Patel made his post alleging the racist attacks, according to Houston Public Media. Meyers recognized one of the accounts as having attacked him before and, suspicious of its motivations, hired a private investigator to figure out who was behind it.

When his private investigator came up short, Meyers asked the Fort Bend County District Attorney’s office to look into the accounts posting the messages, Houston Public Media reported. The district attorney’s office issued a subpoena to Facebook and Google and obtained account data that matched Patel’s address, phone number, Texas driver’s license number and bank card number, according to ABC 13.

Patel allegedly used a picture of a real man living in Fort Bend County for a fake account, according to Houston Public Media. The man told the district attorney’s office that Patel did not have permission to use his likeness.

Texas Rangers arrested Patel on Wednesday for online impersonation, a third-degree felony, and misrepresentation of identity, a misdemeanor, ABC 13 reported. Patel’s total bond was $22,250, which he paid Thursday morning.

Patel’s campaign did not immediately return the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

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(FOX NEWS) – The president of California State University, Los Angeles, ordered an anti-Israel encampment to disburse on Thursday after a group of protesters barricaded and vandalized a campus building.

The student services building, which houses the office of Cal State, L.A. President Berenecea Johnson Eanes, was outfitted with yellow tape and deemed a crime scene by authorities following the Wednesday night incident, according to the Los Angeles Times.

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"A trust we had in the [Gaza Solidarity] Encampment to practice non-violence has been violated," Eanes said in a statement. "I cannot and would not protect anyone who is directly identified as having participated in last night’s illegal activities from being held accountable."

Read the full story ›

(FOX NEWS) – Concerns about the rising cost of tuition and university campus culture are driving a significant number of Americans away from higher education, and entrepreneurs who skipped out on a four-year degree are urging others to follow suit.

Guitar Chalk editor Bobby Kittleberger told Fox News Digital he actively encourages his kids not to attend college. "I like to put it this way: You never see a dude pull up in a Ferrari and think, 'Oh, I bet he has a college degree!' So, I tell my kids, why would you walk a path that by design does not lead to wealth and prosperity?" he said.

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Kittleberger, who also works as a web designer and SEO consultant, has several reasons for pushing his kids away from a traditional university path. Although he graduated with a computer science degree, one of the highest-paying majors right out of college, Kittleberger said his diploma has been "completely irrelevant" to his real-world work and career path.

Read the full story ›

[Editor's note: This story originally was published by Live Action News.]

By Cassy Fiano-Chesser
Live Action News

While debating the role schools play in their students’ abortions, a Michigan school board member said teachers should be able to refer students for abortions.

The Caledonia School Board is debating a current policy which restricts teachers from discussing abortion with students or referring them for one. The school board is considering either eliminating the policy altogether or updating it. During the meeting, Jason Saidoo said teachers should be able to make the decision for themselves if a student should be referred for an abortion.

“I think option one, rescinding the policy, it takes the politics out of it, and leaves the interests of the students into the hands of our teachers that can make the best decision for them,” he said in a video shared by Libs of TikTok.

Meet Jason Saidoo. A school board member of Caledonia Community Schools in Michigan.

When discussing a policy which would allow the school to refer students for abortions, he said the decision should be “in the hands of teachers who can make the best decisions for them… pic.twitter.com/Gd8tgnR5v5

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) May 27, 2024

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Another person, identified by ABC13 as John Brando, replied, “I love our teachers, but this is a parent thing, man. That’s not the option for teachers.” The conversation has since gone viral, and in a lengthy Facebook post, Saidoo responded to the controversy:

I agree that this should be a parent conversation. I said so during the same discussion quoted in the memes. My concern is that my fellow board member who is promoting the policy cannot define “assistance” when directly asked during the meeting.

Would providing information, without opinion, on all pregnancy options constitute assistance? Would answering questions about the dangers of abortion constitute assistance? My concern is for the students who may not have the space at home for these conversations. Maybe a single parent who is absent. Parents who are incapacitated in some manner. A child given custody to a relative they barely know. Or even the student who may come to the counselor with “I need help talking to my parents.”

I believe that listening to the entire conversation would have made clear that the “decision” in the oft quoted line was a decision to listen and help the student or say “that’s a conversation to be had with your parents.” Make the best choice for the student between those two options. Keeping the policy in place leaves only the latter choice.

There must be a balance between parents’ rights and allowing kids in need to get help.

It sounds eloquent and reasonable, but the problem is, abortion is the only medical procedure in which an educator would be excused for bypassing parents and making the arrangements for a minor on their own.

Furthermore, this debate isn’t taking place in a vacuum; the Michigan abortion industry is currently working to eliminate the state’s parental consent law.

“The organizations who published this advocacy piece and their political allies believe they know what is best for children, not parents,” Right to Life of Michigan Legislative Director Genevieve Marnon told the Detroit Free Press earlier this year. “They are actively seeking to remove parents from one of the most important decisions a minor girl could face, one that everyone acknowledges will have a lifelong impact regardless of the decision.”

For now, the issue remains unresolved; the board voted to table discussion until a later date.

[Editor's note: This story originally was published by Live Action News.]

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[Editor's note: This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire.]

By Vince Bielski
Real Clear Wire

COLUMBUS, Ohio—On a bright morning in May at the Columbus Collegiate Academy Main, orderliness is on display. Students in khakis and blue tops carrying bulging backpacks walk briskly in line through the front doors of the single-story brick building – looking like young people who really want to be there.

In class after class, the predominantly black and Latino student body appears seriously engaged, with pencils in hand or fingers on keyboards. Teachers move rapidly through lessons. Hands shoot up to answer questions. No one is fooling around or disturbing others, which seems remarkable for a middle school full of teenagers.

The academy is one of an estimated 1,000 high-performing urban charters that run on the No Excuses model. Its firm rules for behavior require students to sit up at their desks, remain silent unless called upon, and respect each other, which creates calm conditions for learning.

After another year of disarray in many urban public schools, with the vast majority of teachers reporting that behavior issues were their biggest challenge, proponents say No Excuses charters provide an example of how to restore order and learning.

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Instead, they have been banished to the sidelines of public education. Progressive educators who have embraced “anti-racism” as their guiding principle over the last five years have assailed the charters, claiming they single out students of color for stern discipline. The rhetoric has been inflammatory, alleging that the charters “control black bodies” and prepare students for prison, despite the high rate of No Excuses graduates who go on to college.

The term “No Excuses” was coined in the 1990s as a plea for educators to stop using excuses, such as poverty and broken homes, for the turmoil in urban schools that made learning impossible. A group of teachers, including David Levin of the charter network KIPP, brought together ideas from their experiences to fashion a new kind of urban school with a culture of high academic expectations and a precise set of rules and consequences to help students reach them.

Today, the slogan No Excuses is so controversial that many charters avoid it, even while continuing its practices. Other charter networks, like Achievement First, have completely abandoned the No Excuses model and joined the anti-racism crusade, only to see their performance plummet after ratcheting back discipline and lowering academic standards to ensure students pass courses and graduate.

No Excuses leaders admit they made mistakes early on in their zeal to improve urban education. Some networks, such as KIPP, pushed discipline too far by publicly shaming students, a stain on the movement’s record. Others, like Ascend Learning, depended on rote instruction that discouraged students from thinking for themselves and developing the inquisitiveness and agency they would need to succeed in college and beyond.

The criticism spurred many No Excuses charters to change, becoming less rule-bound and more student-led, says Steven Wilson, the founder of Ascend Learning.

“One of the things that I admire about these high-performing charters is that they are constantly willing to criticize themselves and evolve,” said Wilson, whose book about how anti-racism doctrine is replacing academic instruction will be published this fall. “No Excuses practices could really help traditional schools struggling with high levels of misbehavior if they were willing to evolve, too.”

But one core principle of No Excuses hasn’t changed, according to Doug Lemov, author of a popular No Excuses teaching manual entitled “Teach Like a Champion”: Equity for marginalized students starts with their high achievement in school.

A Day at Columbus Collegiate Academy

What sets No Excuses schools apart is the priority they place on creating a culture of high expectations that’s constantly reinforced. Students at the Columbus academy hear daily pep talks over the public address system about hard work leading to success. They strive to be included among the names of students who are learning rapidly that are posted in the hallway. They also look up at the dozens of college pennants hanging on walls, reminding them to keep their eye on the prize.

Teachers also must buy in to the demanding culture by acting with urgency in almost everything they do. Urgency is a key concept in No Excuses, as if there isn’t a minute to lose in educating these students who enter the school several years behind grade level.

Lessons are tightly scripted to the clock to squeeze in as much learning as possible. Teachers, rather than students, move through the shiny, clean hallways from classroom to classroom during the day because it takes less time and creates less commotion. Kids change rooms for classes like physical education.

Culture-building begins immediately at the start of each year. In the first three days of school, called “culture camp,” students learn the rules of behavior, such as keeping their eyes on the teacher and a pencil at the ready, and why those rules are key to meeting the high academic standards. Then they practice these skills, like how to show respect to teachers and peers, before they open a textbook.

“It’s important to be very explicit to students about the expectations and why they are necessary,” said Andy Boy, CEO of United Schools Network, which operates the Columbus academy. “They feel a sense of relief in that it takes the guesswork out of how to become successful students.”

During the year, the charter uses a paycheck system, with students receiving “dollars” for good behavior and losing them for misbehavior. At the end of each week, kids earning a lot of money can buy items at the school store, dress down in T-shirts, and have fun at the school party on Friday. The money system works, with about 85% of 8^th graders making the party cutoff each week, says science teacher Alex Retodo.

Students who earn three deductions in a single class are sent to the culture office, where they talk with staff about why they are acting out and how it disturbs other students. The goal is to quickly get them back in class, and they often return within 20 minutes.

“I really like the structure, there are no gray areas, and it’s the same throughout the school,” says Retodo, who gave up plans for medical school to devote herself to the academy. “The consequences do help students learn how to control themselves in ways that will be productive for them.”

Tyriana Holyfield transferred to the academy in 2023 to escape the rowdiness, bullying, and lack of rigor at a traditional middle school called Buckeye. Holyfield says Buckeye students repeatedly pressured her to stop working hard in class to get good grades, a striving that some black students disparage as “acting white.” Despite her pleas to teachers to intervene, the bullying continued. “There was no discipline,” she says. “And I wasn’t being challenged in class either.”

At the Columbus academy, Holyfield has found a more rigorous school where she is excelling. Teachers show they care by pushing her to do better in class, something she hadn’t experienced before. There’s homework most nights. “I do want to go to college and be a good example for my five siblings,” said Holyfield, whose mom works at a nail salon.

United’s schools haven’t been immune to the fallout of the pandemic lockdowns. The extra pressure on teachers, plus the relatively low starting salary, which was recently raised to $49,000, led to an exodus of teachers in 2022-23 and a jump in suspensions. But this school year, both problems receded. At the Columbus academy, 27% of students served at least one suspension this school year.

United’s academic results are what make the network of 815 students stand out. In 2019, its three charters outperformed the public schools in their neighborhood on state tests by at least 20 percentage points, an enormous gap. Through the tough pandemic times, two of the United schools widened their lead by 2023.

“We outscored them because we work hard and stuck with our mission of high expectations even though it is not super popular,” says Diana Wakim, chief advancement officer at United.

No More No Excuses

Other charters like KIPP, the biggest network in the country with 275 schools, buckled under the pressure from progressive staffers, alums, and advocates to drop their No Excuses practices.

Two months after the police murder of George Floyd in 2020 gripped the nation, Levin, the KIPP co-founder, famously issued a public letter, apologizing that its discipline practices “perpetuated white supremacy and anti-Blackness” and underscoring his commitment to restorative justice and racial equity. KIPP also dropped its “Work Hard, Be Nice” slogan, since it was seen as bolstering a myth that hard work leads to success even in the face of racism.

KIPP DC, one branch of the national network, embraced Levin’s "anti-racist" message and suffered academically because of it, says Anaka Osborne, who taught at its AIM middle school for six years. Osborne says the school went from using an effective and balanced No Excuses approach, with teachers demanding much of students but also cutting them a break when problems emerged at home, to a culture of coddling – both during and after the pandemic.

After KIPP DC lowered academic standards and jettisoned its ladder of consequences that had kept classrooms calm, Osborne, who is black and Filipino, decided to quit. “Students were making minimal effort and were passed along,” she said. “When schools lower the bar for black and Latino students, that in itself is racist.”

Today, KIPP DC is no longer an academic powerhouse. In 2019, its schools on average outperformed the public school district in math and English. Last year, KIPP DC trailed far behind the district, with only 13% proficiency in math and 18% in English. Levin and KIPP DC did not respond to requests for comment.

Achievement First, a network of 41 schools in New York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, also unraveled.

It rode a No Excuses program to higher and higher test scores in the five years before the pandemic. The co-founders took the assessments seriously and were key to helping teachers figure out how to improve instruction, according to a former senior leader at Achievement First. In 2019, the charters outperformed the public schools in their three states by double-digit margins, underscoring the Achievement First name.

But as the network adopted what proponents call the anti-racist agenda, its views on testing changed. School leaders said performance on tests would no longer be such a high priority because it doesn’t “tell the full story of student growth,” according to a 2022 memo to staff that was sent after scores plunged. The full story would now stress social and emotional learning and student experience.

Network leaders prioritized reducing suspensions over academics. This meant ditching the discipline system with consequences for unruly behavior and replacing it with "restorative justice" practices, the former senior leader said. The high academic expectations also disappeared: Struggling students who under No Excuses would have been held back, amounting to about 7% of kids, were now all promoted to the next grade.

“Students can basically do whatever they want, and nothing really happens to them,” said the source, who resigned because he opposed the changes. “The less experienced teachers have seen their classrooms descend into chaos.”

Achievement First schools are no longer envied for their performance, with test scores in Connecticut and Rhode Island plunging below the state public school averages. In Rhode Island, for instance, the charters in 2019 topped the state in English and math proficiency by 17 and 23 percentage points, respectively. In 2023, under an anti-racism program, the charters lagged behind by three and four percentage points.

Achievement First’s website does boast that U.S. News & World Report ranks its Hartford High as No. 3 and Amistad High as No. 12 in Connecticut, without providing the year. In the 2024 rankings, Amistad is No. 45 and Hartford didn’t make the top 100 cut. Achievement First did not respond to requests for comment.

The Evolution of No Excuses

The No Excuses schools that stood their ground in the face of progressive pressure have had a much stronger run through the pandemic. But they have also evolved.

Education scholar Joanne Golann, who embedded herself in a No Excuses charter a decade ago and wrote a book about it, “Scripting the Moves,” raised serious questions about whether all the rules were blunting the assertiveness of the students. After finding success by following the No Excuses playbook, would these students thrive when left to their own devices in college? Would they have the gumption to challenge the racism they encountered at work or just submit to authority, as they did in school?

“Students who were told what to do all the time in No Excuses schools said it didn’t translate well to the college environment, where they needed to be independent, make their own decisions, and speak up in class,” Golann said.

Wilson, the Ascend founder, says he took Golann’s critique to heart, making changes to give students more “agency and voice” over their education. After students abided by a system that gave them frequent feedback about their behavior in elementary school, they were tired of it and ready for more freedom in middle school. So Ascend dropped its feedback system but kept its high expectations and found that behavior improved because students had learned how to govern themselves, says Wilson.

The Columbus academy retained its behavior grading system but in a modified form. It eased up on rules in recognition that students from poor families need more support. Rather than immediately giving students a deduction for falling asleep in class, for instance, teachers now tell them to take a break, and try to find out if they are having problems at home, says English teacher Jenn Felbaum. Penalties were also dropped for small matters, such as not wearing the proper clothing or not bringing a pencil to school. Equally significant, No Excuses charters also dispensed with their style of instruction that gave teachers maximum control over learning. Teachers had used a didactic approach, showing students how a problem is solved and then asking them to solve it themselves.

Now teachers ask students to struggle through the problem themselves and collaborate with classmates to find answers before they lend a hand. No Excuses leaders say the approach builds self-reliance in students and better prepares them for college.

Brooke, a charter network in Boston that uses some No Excuses practices, says its college-prep program “puts the thinking on kids.” Its predominately black and Latino students are encouraged to believe that, through hard work, they can be high achievers and go to college. All high school students are required to take at least three AP classes, a practice not found in traditional public schools. Last year, Brooke was the highest-performing open-enrollment high school in Boston.

Since Brooke’s first graduating class in 2020, 84% of its students started two- and four-year college programs the semester after graduating, far exceeding the percentage for Boston public schools in 2021. At Brooke’s college signing day celebration, students announce the college they are going to, and everyone in the room is psyched for them, says Kimberly Steadman, Brooke’s co-director.

“We deeply believe all kids can achieve, and we develop this confidence in them by talking about it all the time and celebrating their academic achievements,” said Steadman.

Ripe for Expansion?

The final test of No Excuses charters is the all-important college graduation rate of their students. Nationwide, only about 11% of students from low-income families graduate college in six years. KIPP did much better, reporting a rate of 39%, based on students who graduated high school before some of its charters entirely dropped No Excuses.

Success Academy, the star of the No Excuses movement, credits its remarkable rate of more than 80%, which tops the national average for all students, to the 13 advanced placement classes all kids must take starting in middle school and five exams they must pass to graduate.

“Success Academy is the most No Excuses of them all,” said Robert Pondiscio, the author of a book about New York City’s largest charter network called “How the Other Half Learns.” “It has the most cohesive culture I have ever seen, and when you nail the culture, almost any program will work.”

To be sure, not all No Excuses schools are high performers. Some are unable to complete the difficult task of building strong cultures where students can thrive. But they remain very popular with families. Parents see them as safe havens free from the bedlam of other public schools. Some like Brooke have waiting lists. The United network is gearing up to expand in the next few years.

In a sign that No Excuses may be ripe for a rebound, some charters that turned away from its disciplinary practices are realizing that was a mistake, says Sue Walsh, a former No Excuses school leader.

“Well-intended educators embraced a lot of antiracist practices that don’t work,” said Walsh, who consults with charters. “And a goodly number of them are rethinking those moves and coming back to No Excuses.”

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Colleges are "admitting" students even before they apply in order to bolster minority numbers, according to a new report.

The college-to-career route has been bludgeoned in recent years in America by several factors. One is that employers, even major and high-profile employers, no longer are insisting on that four-year B.A. degree for applicants.

Further, there's been the dramatic left turn in college campus atmospheres, where leftist ideology is promoted at the faculty level and conservative students often are targeted for not adhering to the abortion, transgender and Palestinian ideologies.

Now a report in the Washington Times explains those impacts have hit at enrollment numbers, and especially those closely watched numbers for minorities.

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The report said the colleges now use "direct admissions," the plan that admits to colleges high school students, and those numbers have "more than doubled."

"The practice allows high school students who maintain a passing grade to bypass SAT testing, essay requirements, application fees and other paperwork to go straight into second-tier regional colleges," the report said.

Promoters said in the report the plan saves time, resources and paperwork for schools, especially "lower-tier" academies where officials struggle over enrollment declines and pandemic-era cost increases "that have reduced the number of low-income, black and Hispanic applicants."

The report noted the surge in such plans comes as "students have increasingly favored blue-collar trade certifications and community colleges over pricier four-year programs as tuition and living costs have risen."

There's also the problem of dropouts, described by Peter Wood of the National Association of Scholars.

"Direct admissions is aggressive marketing akin to sending unsolicited credit cards to people. The message is that college admission has nothing to do with academic achievement or intellectual performance."

The report said nine states already have offered such programs, and more are planning to follow.

"In the California State University system, Fresno State’s 'Bulldog Bound' program automatically accepts freshmen from 89 public high schools who graduate with a 'C' average or 2.5 GPA. These freshmen get Fresno State IDs, email addresses, access to campus libraries, and have their college applications, fees and standardized testing requirements waived," the report said.

Len Jessup, former president of the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, said he thinks those efforts "will help struggling schools stay afloat financially."

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(THE COLLEGE FIX) -- The University of Missouri’s decision to end scholarships that discriminate on the basis of race has left some donors feeling “betrayed.”

The university’s four campuses have been working with donors to revise scholarships that exclude white students, and in some cases Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans, to ensure they comply with federal law.

“Several of the donors in question spoke with Inside Higher Ed, some on the record, some on background for fear of jeopardizing ongoing discussions with the university,” the news outlet reported. “They said the conversations have been fraught, coercive and disappointing.”

Read the full story ›

(Photo by Joe Kovacs)

(THE COLLEGE FIX) -- A student at Howard University has gone viral due to her public resignation letter she recently posted renouncing her affiliation with her new sorority, arguing its induction ceremony made her feel like she essentially worshipped a false God, a compromise of her Christian faith.

Student Zora Sanders called out the sorority, Delta Sigma Theta, in a two-page letter she posted to her Instagram account in May. Sanders and sorority representatives did not respond to requests from The College Fix seeking comment in recent weeks about the controversy.

Sanders, in her letter, described herself as a rising senior at Howard and a former member of its Delta Sigma Theta chapter, writing she “renounced and denounced” her membership.

Read the full story ›

By Nick Pope
Daily Caller News Foundation

The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) is making climate-related demands in contract negotiations as the city’s students continue to struggle mightily in the classroom, according to E&E News.

The CTU will push the city to include initiatives like electric school buses, green jobs training programs for students and reducing emissions from buildings with solar panels and other retrofits, among other initiatives, according to E&E News. Those demands are being made while 2023 testing data shows that about 75% of Chicago’s public school students were unable to read at grade level and 83% of students were behind grade level proficiency in math, according to the Illinois Policy Institute.

The union is also demanding the removal of all lead pipes in school buildings, replacement of windows that do not open and the creation of a “climate champion” role at each school to organize climate-related initiatives and activities, according to E&E News. CTU is also proposing to have solar panels and heat pumps installed in school buildings, as well as to create “heating and cooling centers” for communal use when temperatures are either very hot or very cold.

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The union’s climate wishlist could cost hundreds of millions of dollars if granted in full, according to E&E News.

CTU could be well-positioned to land a favorable contract because it provided millions of dollars to Democratic Mayor Brandon Johnson’s mayoral campaign, and Johnson himself is a former organizer for the union, E&E News reported. The union also pushed to keep students out of school in favor of learning online during the pandemic, and Chicago’s school system has the worst chronic absenteeism among America’s largest districts, according to the Illinois Policy Institute.

“This is Chicago Teachers Union’s demonstration of our accountability to our larger community,” CTU President Stacy Davis Gates told E&E News. “Our collective bargaining agreement and our coalition work, especially in communities of color, will be a net benefit to everyone.”

Neither CTU nor Johnson’s office responded immediately to requests for comment.

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(THE COLLEGE FIX) -- Nature, one of the world’s premier scientific journals, has acknowledged the importance of studying sex and gender differences and officially denounced the “climate of fear and reticence” that is stymying research on the topic.

To that end, the journal in May launched “a collection of opinion articles” on the topic to be published over the coming months to foster honest and courageous discussions on a topic that many scientists shy away from due to fears of professional and personal repercussions.

“Some scientists have been warned off studying sex differences by colleagues. Others, who are already working on sex or gender-related topics, are hesitant to publish their views,” read the editorial introducing the series.

Read the full story ›

(THE COLLEGE FIX) -- The University of Florida plans to offer a “Data Feminisms” course this upcoming semester.

However, the public university refuses to provide a current syllabus.

The class will use “critical data, algorithm studies, and feminist science and technology studies to develop essential tools of inquiry needed to approach data in a context of racialized, gendered, colonial, and classed systems of power,” according to its description.

Read the full story ›

One of Joe Biden's key weapons in his promotion of the LGBT ideology for not just people in America but around the world has been his simple redefinition of words.

"Sex," his administration has claimed, actually means "sexual orientation" or "gender identity." Thus, his LGBT goals have been "protected" in federal law for decades, he claims.

Using that simple maneuver Biden bureaucrats have tried to impose that ideology on churches, foster parents, adoptive families, schools, and many others.

Now he's run into reality.

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In the form of a federal judge who concluded in a court fight over Biden's agenda that when a 1972 law refers to "sex," it "carried an unambiguously binary meaning."

The Post-Millennial reported on the decision in Texas' lawsuit against Biden over his "guidance" on Title IX.

That law essentially rules that males and females should be treated equally in schools.

Biden demanded through his redefinitions that that law actually, when written in 1972, meant "sexual orientation" and "gender identity."

Biden's goal was to remove standards in schools that limited boys, in intimate situations such as locker rooms, to be with other boys, and girls with girls.

Texas' case was against Biden's Department of Education and its secretary Miguel Cardona, and the Department of Justice and Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton explained Biden's changes were "not in accordance with law and are in excess of statutory authority because they rely upon the interpretation of Title VII described in Bostock and apply it to Title IX."

Judge Reed O'Connor, in the U.S. district court in northern Texas, took Texas' side: "Because of this prohibition on sex discrimination, recipients of federal funds generally cannot discriminate based on someone’s sex. However, nothing in the statute expressly prohibits discrimination based on gender identity or other unexpressed grounds. And where Title IX allows for differentiation based on sex due to biological differences—such as intimate facilities and athletic teams—recipients may treat persons in accordance with their biological sex without regard to subjective gender identity."

He explained an investigation into contemporary dictionaries "does not support" Biden's claims.

"Title IX explicitly appreciates the innate biological variation between men and women that occasionally warrants differentiation—and even separation—to preserve educational opportunities and to promote respect for both sexes," the judge said. "Rather than promote the equal opportunity, dignity, and respect that Title IX demands for both biological sexes, Defendants’ Guidance Documents do the opposite in an effort to advance an agenda wholly divorced from the text, structure, and contemporary context of Title IX."

The judge continued, "Not to mention, recipients of Title IX funding—including Texas schools—will face an impossible choice: revise policies in compliance with the Guidance Documents but in contravention of state law or face the loss of substantial funding. Thus, to allow Defendants’ unlawful action to stand would be to functionally rewrite Title IX in a way that shockingly transforms American education and usurps a major question from Congress. That is not how our democratic system functions."

Paxton said his state "prevailed on behalf of the entire nation."

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(THE COLLEGE FIX) -- Cambridge University Press changed the name of its journal Anglo-Saxon England this spring, but two scholars said the change sends the wrong message.

The publisher said the new name, Early Medieval England and its Neighbors, is part of a series of changes being instituted at the 50-year-old journal.

Now Cambridge has changed the name of their journal from "Anglo-Saxon" to "Early Medieval"

"Cambridge is teaching students that Anglo-Saxons did not exist as a distinct ethnic group as part of efforts to undermine “myths of nationalism”."https://t.co/cB1iKZs2tE

— Wanjiru Njoya (@WanjiruNjoya) May 9, 2024

“The new title reflects the breadth of that scholarly work, and is one part of a broader relaunch of the journal, which is now Open Access, will have more regular publications, and take on an expanded scope,” Cambridge University Press said in a recent statement provided to The College Fix via email.

Read the full story ›

By Harold Hutchison
Daily Caller News Foundation

Former University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas’ challenge to a rule that prevents the biological male from competing against women in “elite events” was shot down Wednesday.

The Court of Arbitration for Sport denied the legal effort of Thomas, a biological male, to overturn rules issued in March 2023 by World Aquatics, the international governing body for competitive swimming and several other Olympic events, according to the Guardian. Thomas had sought to compete against women in the 2024 Summer Olympic games in Paris.

“The panel concludes that she lacks standing to challenge the policy and the operational requirements in the framework of the present proceeding,” the court said in its ruling, the Associated Press reported.

BREAKING: Biological male transgender athlete Lia Thomas loses legal challenge, banned from competing against biological females in Olympics. pic.twitter.com/5VqgwGCm79

— WorldNetDaily (@worldnetdaily) June 12, 2024

“She is currently only entitled to compete in USA Swimming events that do not qualify as ‘Elite Events,’” the panel said in its ruling, according to USA Today.

The issue of biological males who identify as transgender competing in women’s sports became controversial following Thomas’s participation in the 2022 NCAA championships, where the biological male won the 500-yard women’s final by 1.75 seconds.

“World Aquatics welcomes the recent decision made by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) regarding the case of Lia Thomas, which we believe is a major step forward in our efforts to protect women’s sport,” the organization said in a statement provided to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “World Aquatics is dedicated to fostering an environment that promotes fairness, respect, and equal opportunities for athletes of all genders and we reaffirm this pledge.”

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“Our policies and practices are continuously evaluated to ensure they align with these core values, which led to the introduction of our open category,” the statement continued. “We remain committed to working collaboratively with all stakeholders to uphold the principles of inclusivity in aquatic sports and remain confident that our gender inclusion policy represents a fair approach.”

Riley Gaines, who competed against Thomas as a member of the University of Kentucky’s swim team during the 2022 NCAA Championships, has been a vocal critic of allowing transgender athletes to compete against women.

The Olympic Games are scheduled to start July 26 in Paris, with hundreds of athletes competing in events that include basketball, gymnastics, diving, swimming, wrestling and weightlifting.

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Surveillance video shows Audrey Hale stalking the halls of the Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, on Monday, March 27, 2023.

A Tennessee publication has obtained photographic images of some of the writings of Audrey Hale, who killed three children and three adults in a mass shooting at a Christian school in Nashville, and they reveal a woman hoping her mass murder would give her an eternal gender transition so her "male body" would get the "erotic affection of brown-skinned females in heaven."

The information about Hale was obtained by the Tennessee Star, which now is facing a judge's grilling over how the information was obtained.

Authorities, using the court system, have suppressed the details revealed in Hale's own journals and manifestos since the shooting, purportedly because of an ongoing investigation, which isn't identified.

Reports, however, suggest that that may be over her alleged revelation to counselors she wanted to do mass murder, and their failure to alert authorities.

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While the Star has documented Hale's agenda in multiple reports, it is the Washington Stand that assembled the details online.

The handwritten pages from Hale "deeply reflect transgender ideology and critical race theory," and reveal she hated her father, had fantasized school shootings for years, and referred to Jesus with a curse word, the report explains.

Legacy reporting appears to have given Hale part of her wish for after death, as online report now routinely refers to Hale as "he."

It was on March 27, 2023, when Hale shot her way into The Covenant School, an elementary run by the Presbyterian Church in America. The 28-year-old killed three nine-year-old students and three adults, a custodian, the school chief and a substitute teacher.

She fired some 150 shots, including those fired point-blank after her victims already were down, and subsequent shots at police officers, who killed her when they returned her fire.

The report explained she left behind more than 20 journals outlining her troubles, her intentions and "layers of motives including frustrated lesbian affairs, lifelong psychological problems, pharmaceutical side effects, an irrational hatred of her father, and the profound influence of cultural and political tropes associated with critical theory," the report said.

Among the revelations were that she idolized a former classmate, a girl who died in a car accident, expressed frustration over unrequited same-sex attractions and how, in her mind, gender transition was easy with few drawbacks.

A former teacher who taught Hale at the Nossi College of Art & Design told The New York Times Hale's public persona as a "boy" began after she broke up with a girlfriend.

Hale's father, Ronald Hale, told investigators his daughter didn't know what was involved in gender change, which scientifically is impossible as being male or female is embedded down to the DNA level.

"She figured she could, like, go to the hospital and just get it done. … She thought she could have an operation," he told investigators.

Hale titled one three-page entry, "My Imaginary Penis," and reveals the depth of her plunge into the gender ideology falsehoods.

She adopted "Aiden" as a name.

"The writings show her social, and possibly medical, transition did not improve her mental health. After changing her gender identity, Hale deems herself 'the most unhappy boy alive.' She writes that most women are attracted to men — and her self-identity did not change their attraction," the report said.

Hale wrote, "I will be of no use of love for any girl if I don’t have what they need: boy’s body / male gender."

She continued, "[M]y body doesn’t make me a female. I wish death on myself cause of the pure hatred of my female gender."

She also revealed her apparent adoption of the diversity and equity ideology being pushed across America these days.

Just weeks before her attack she wrote, "I am nothing. Brown love is the most beautiful kind."

Conservative activist Steven Crowder previously obtained a sampling of her writings and rage, in which Hale blasts her former Covenant classmates. "Wanna kill all you little crackers!!! Bunch of little fa***ts w/ your white privileges."

Her total despair sometimes took over, when she wrote, "Nothing on earth can save me… never ending pain. Religion won’t save. … Everything hurts."

She fantasized about her own death: "The [cocoon] of my old self will die when I leave my body behind and the boy in me will be free; in the butterfly transformation; the real me. … If God won’t give me a boy body in heaven, then Jesus is a f*****."

She talks about wanting to kill her father and, the documents reveal, gave her toys and stuffed animals an affection that otherwise might have gone to her family.

Hale identified as transgender at the time of the murders, having left a letter for her parents, "I'm sorry, but it is my time to go … I love you, Aiden."

Her writings reveal she had "planned to die" for years, meticulously making her arrangements.

And she hints at what may yet be under investigation: "Don’t know how I was able to get this far, but here I am. … There were several times I could have been caught, especially back in the summer of 2021."

She had been treated at Vanderbilt University Medical Center for 22 years, and records from that facility are being reviewed. She had been prescribed Buspirone, Lexapro (or Escitalopram), and Hydroxyzine, the report in the Star said.

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By Jennifer Nuelle
Daily Caller News Foundation

A New Mexico high school used $10,000 in grant funds to purchase “chest binders” and pro-LGBTQ books for its library, emails show.

Centennial High School received the grant from a pro-LGBT nonprofit, It Gets Better, to construct a “gender-inclusive closet” that would provide “supplies and clothes for trans and gender non-conforming students,” according to an announcement. Yet the school appears to have used the money for a different purpose, instead spending $8,370 on “chest binders” to hand out at a “Pride Day event,” communications between Las Cruces Public Schools’ (LCPS) legal support department and the New Mexico Freedoms Alliance, a civil liberty watchdog, reveal.

It Gets Better is “an organization with a mission to uplift, empower, and connect lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer youth around the globe.” In 2022, the organization awarded 50 grants in 40 states, with each school that applied receiving the full $10,000.

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Ashley McClure, an independent storytelling assistant for the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF), first learned of the $10,000 grant for the “gender-inclusive closet” after hearing about it from another IWF Storyteller. The IWF obtained documents through the New Mexico Freedoms Alliance, which were then shared with the Daily Caller News Foundation.

“That just shows that building a trans closet, like building neutral bathrooms, that’s not a grassroots thing. It’s these nonprofits funding it,” McClure told the DCNF.

The New Mexico Freedoms Alliance filed a public records request in April of 2024 and found that Centennial High School did not use that grant money to open a “gender-inclusive closet.”

U.S. schools are stocking up on “gender-affirming” gear in an attempt to aid students with their gender identity.

Despite the grant not being used specifically for the “transgender closet,” Centennial High School still opened a closet that is open to all students, according to McClure.

LCPS’ legal support department told the New Mexico Freedoms Alliance that $8,370 of the $10,000 grant money was used to purchase “chest binders” that were handed out at the first-ever Pride Parade in October of 2023 as part of the Southern New Mexico two-week long Pride celebration, according to the emails obtained by the Alliance and shared with the IWF. The remaining $1,630 of the grant money was used to purchase LGBTQ+ books for the school’s library and $73.52 on a pizza party.

One book to be added to the school’s library, “Felix Ever After” involves a transgender male figure, according to IWF. Another called “Simon vs The Homo Sapiens Agenda” is about a high-schooler who is a closeted homosexual exploring explicit themes.

“You know, everyone’s always talking about how schools are underfunded, but you know the fact that they chose to spend their money on those things just shows the clear ideological agenda,” McClure told the DCNF. 

It Gets Better awarded grants to other schools across the U.S. to push pro-LGBTQ initiatives through school-based projects.

Telluride Middle/High School in Colorado used their $10,000 to change bathrooms into being gender-neutral. A Hawaii school used their grant to establish a program to educate parents on having LGBTQ-related conversations.

It Gets Better did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment. Centennial High School and the New Mexico Freedoms Alliance referred the DCNF to LCPS’ comments on the grant money.

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Police in New York City mobilize to confront anti-Israel protesters at Columbia University on Tuesday, April 30, 2024.

By John Mancini
Daily Caller News Foundation

Forty-four percent of Democrats approve of the recent anti-Israel protests on college campuses, according to a Tuesday Politico-Morning Consult poll.

While 74% of Democrats report that student protesters are “in the right” with their intentions, 48% think the protests have gone too far, according to the poll. Fifty percent of Gen Z and millennial voters, on the other hand, favor the anti-Israel demonstrations.

The Israel-Palestinian conflict has caused President Joe Biden problems, causing him lose support in states such as Michigan.

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Republican voters overwhelmingly oppose the anti-Israel protests. Nearly three-quarters of Republicans disapprove of the protest encampments, according to Politico, with 52% responding that protesters are “in the wrong,” and 31% responding that protesters are “in the right but taking things too far.”

Politico also found that one-third of young voters sympathize with both sides of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, compared to 43% of Democratic voters. Voters aged 18-34, on the other hand, tended to sympathize more with Palestinians than Israel. While Biden previously condoned students’ rights to protest, he also included that “[v]iolent protest is not protected … It’s against the law.” As a result, some Democrats fear that Biden alienates young people and Democrats more broadly.

“Violent protest is not protected; peaceful protest is. ... Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes ... none of this is peaceful protest.”

— President Biden condemns many campus demonstrations. pic.twitter.com/AE7IjPezB4

— The Recount (@therecount) May 2, 2024

Despite this fear, campus protests remain a relatively low priority for voters, according to the poll. Sixty-seven percent of voters claim that “campus demonstrations are important in deciding their 2024 election vote.” But nearly 97% of voters claim that economic performance will decide their vote.

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(THE COLLEGE FIX) -- Rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs can no longer say he has an honorary doctorate from Howard University.

The historically black university in Washington, D.C. rescinded the degree last week following a vote by its board.

The unanimous decision by its board of trustees followed the release in mid-May of a video that appears to show Combs assaulting his former girlfriend, Cassie Ventura.

Read the full story ›

Pat Sajak, center, with U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and RSBN reporter Bryan Glenn (Twitter)

(THE COLLEGE FIX) -- The College Fix has rounded up a highlight reel of some of the best lines, jokes, advice and one-liners from this year’s batch of 2024 commencement graduation speeches.

The three-minute video features actors, politicians, activists — even a Supreme Court justice.

The speakers all offered a mix of levity, sincerity and wisdom in their talks to the class of 2024, but some lines hit better than others.

Read the full story ›

(Photo by Joe Kovacs)

[Editor's note: This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire.]

By Nathan Harden
Real Clear Wire

Parents Defending Education (PDE) is an advocacy organization founded in response to concerns about the increasing influence of activist agendas in K-12 schools, particularly highlighted during the pandemic. Recently, PDE joined a Title IX lawsuit challenging the Biden Administration’s new rules on including transgender athletes in women’s sports. RealClearEducation had a conversation with Nicole Neily, the founder of PDE, about her organization’s objectives in promoting parental engagement and accountability in education, and–more broadly–the organization's efforts to influence the education system.

Can you tell us about the origins of Parents Defending Education (PDE) and what motivated its founding?

At the beginning of the pandemic, I was running a free speech group, Speech First, that focused on colleges and universities – but I became increasingly concerned with what I saw happening in our K-12 schools. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, districts across the country sent out missives about systemic racism and their commitment to antiracism, which mystified a lot of families. Unsurprisingly, many people were fearful about pushing back on this messaging. I think back to when I was growing up – schools didn’t send out notes about Rodney King’s beating, or the Iraq War, or elections in general!

During the fall of 2020, the Wall Street Journal ran an interview with the superintendent of Evanston Public Schools in Illinois, near where I grew up, in which he said he planned to allow black and brown children to return to in-person education before white children because of “anti-racism.” I remember screaming out loud when I read the article because this plan was not only immoral – it was unconstitutional. I decided to form a new organization made up of parents that would be dedicated to protecting K-12 schools through litigation and other means.

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In retrospect, I was fairly naïve because I assumed that most districts that engaged in such policymaking did so out of ignorance and didn’t realize they were violating the law. My initial plan included a program of sending dozens of letters to districts to notify them that they needed to course-correct. I assumed that they would, in fact, make good-faith efforts to change their policies. Three years later, however, it’s become abundantly clear that many education bureaucrats at all levels of government disagree with the underlying tenets of equality before the law and seek to not only change the law but to fundamentally transform American society. This is why our organization is needed now more than ever.

What are the key goals and objectives of Parents Defending Education in reclaiming schools from what your website refers to as “harmful activist agendas?”

The first objective is to educate people about what’s taking place in schools. I grew up watching GI Joe cartoons in the 80s, and the end of every episode had a “life lesson” that concluded “and knowing is half the battle.” It struck me during the pandemic that the vast majority of American parents don’t know what their families’ civil rights are in an education setting, nor do they understand how the education system works in general. In the spring of 2020, several of my Democrat friends from Chicago called me to ask how to get their schools to reopen – because they really believed that their elected officials cared about their input. But as we’ve seen in the years since, nothing could be farther from the truth. They cared about their money and their power, but certainly not our children’s welfare or academic achievement.

For decades, parents have been accustomed to dropping their children at the schoolhouse gates, assuming that their children would receive a solid education. But during COVID, families got a window into what their children were learning (or not learning) when Zoom school was in their living rooms. Families were not only unhappy; they were petrified that if they said the wrong thing, they would be the neighborhood QAnon crank for the rest of their lives. So they kept their mouths shut.

Parents Defending Education seeks to demystify the education space, translating policy and legal jargon into English, exposing problems, and investigating how some of these issues arose in the first place.

A second objective is engagement. Education used to be a partnership between schools and parents, working together in the best interest of a child. But today, many families aren’t fully aware of what their children are learning and are held at arms’ length. Parental involvement isn’t – or shouldn’t be – a partisan issue. Sadly, many people simply don’t know where to begin; our collective civic engagement muscles have atrophied from lack of use. At Parents Defending Education, we’ve created guides and portals for people to get involved. This includes basic questions to ask school officials, how to file a civil rights complaint, and comment portals for people to weigh in at the state and federal levels on policy reforms.

Every person has a different level of risk tolerance, so while some people might be willing to speak up at a school board meeting, others might be more reticent to do so. But even the hesitant parent might be willing to have a private conversation with an administrator or even to pass on a tip to us anonymously. Every person can do something. It’s been absolutely incredible over the past few years to watch thousands of people get off the sidelines and say, “If not me, then who – if not now, then when,” knowing full well that they’ll receive blowback from their communities for having the temerity to speak out. Courage is contagious, and we have witnessed so many brave mothers and fathers (and grandparents!) use their voices for the first time.

The final objective is accountability. For far too long, education officials have become accustomed to operating behind closed doors – wasting money on pet projects and then passing nine-figure bond initiatives to make up their shortfalls (while the rest of us must stick to a budget), teaching one-sided lessons, and lowering standards to mask that the quality of education in 2024 is less than it was 30 years ago. Through our tip line and an aggressive public records campaign, we’ve been able to expose what’s really going on and how districts and schools are operating with our tax dollars. If every teacher in America needs to think to him or herself, “Is this lesson plan going to end up on the national news tonight,” it forces them to decide whether their political activism is worth it. If every principal must think, “Do I know what’s going on in my building? Because I’m the one who’s going to be called for comment by the local press,” then they’re going to exercise greater oversight. And if every school board member must think “I’m going to lose my seat if we’re not delivering the educational experience that my constituents expect,” then budget and employment decisions will be made accordingly.

Could you describe some of the specific challenges or issues that PDE seeks to address within the education system?

Over the past three years, the issues have evolved, which is what makes this job interesting – no two days are ever the same! In 2021, nearly all the tips that we received were about race: the 1619 Project, BLM at School, and racially segregated “affinity groups” and “healing circles,” which excluded students and staff from programming based solely on skin color. In 2022 and 2023, most of the tips were about “gender identity”: compelled pronouns, lesson plans, bathrooms and locker rooms, overnight field trips, and athletics. Since 10/7, we’ve fielded hundreds of issues related to antisemitism in K-12 schools, which in my opinion is as pervasive as in higher education but has gone underreported. Outside entities influencing schools is another troubling area – be it foreign funding, progressive foundations, or race and gender consultants advising districts and providing “professional development” training for teachers.

Your organization recently joined a lawsuit against the Biden administration’s new Title IX rule changes. Can you explain the basis of this lawsuit and its significance in protecting students' rights?

A bit of background: Passed in 1972, Title IX is a mere 37 words long, and was written to prevent discrimination on the basis of sex in education settings. (“No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”) In plain English, this means that an individual must be treated differently than another based on sex. Two decades ago, this was viewed largely in the athletics context.

Immediately upon taking office, the Biden Administration signaled its intent to undo Betsy DeVos’ Title IX rules – issuing guidance and beginning the notice and comment process to codify their radical changes. In 2022 and 2023, PDE submitted formal comments in opposition to these rules, and also created comment portals that helped over 62,000 people submit their own comments (approximately 25% of the total comments filed!).

The final rule was released in April 2024 and was every bit as terrible and illegal as anticipated. The most significant aspect of the rewrite is that the Education Department has redefined the word “sex” to include “sexual orientation and gender identity,” changing the meaning of the statute entirely. In 1972, the word “sex” meant what it still means today – the binary concept – and the Department has no authority to redefine the plain text of the law.

The rule is a direct assault on parental rights, including parents’ right to access their child’s information under FERPA and state laws. In response to public comments which raised concerns that the rule might bar a recipient from treating a student according to their biological sex if requested by the parents to do so, notifying a student’s parents of the student’s gender transition or gender identity, or letting parents access their child’s educational records (including information about their child’s gender identity), the Education Department conceded that the rule can require such results, even when state law guarantees these parental rights. PDE maintains a running list of districts that maintain “parental exclusion policies” with regard to students’ gender identities at school; as of May 7, we’ve identified 1,062 districts impacting more than 10.8 million children.

At a minimum, the new rule will force these parents to have difficult discussions about sex and gender identity with their children before the children are ready.

How does the new Title IX regulation affect the core mission of Parents Defending Education, particularly regarding concerns about privacy and due process in schools?

Since the Biden Administration’s rule was released, PDE has fielded more questions and concerns from parents about how this will impact their children and this surge will only worsen as the rule coerces school districts into adopting illegal policies. Before the Biden Administration’s Title IX rulemaking, some schools already had bullying and harassment policies that punished students who “misgendered” their peers, bathrooms and locker rooms were opened up to students based on “gender identity,” and students were housed on overnight field trips accordingly. Thanks to Biden’s rule, these policies will spread to countless more schools.

In what ways does Parents Defending Education collaborate with other organizations or stakeholders to achieve its objectives?

Several of my colleagues and I have worked in and around public policy for many years, which means that we’ve been able to leverage many preexisting relationships with think tanks at the state and national level – as well as federal policymakers, state attorneys general, and reporters.

Our team also works with over 300 parent groups across the country, sharing information and resources and regularly meeting with parent advocates around the country.

How does PDE engage with local communities and parents to raise awareness and advocate for changes in education policies?

Every district is different – so we work with the individuals who send us tips to determine how best to engage. Success means something different to everyone. Some people just want a lesson plan canceled, while others desire different outcomes like leadership changes or policy rescissions. The people who reach out to us know their communities best – so we’ll discuss tactics like which policymakers might be worth approaching (and at what level of government), what to say, whether it might be more constructive to go to the media to exert public pressure, and whether the legal system might be a viable option. We encourage people to start with an open mind by asking questions and to not assume ill will – but also to document their interactions and to elevate their concerns as needed.

Could you share any successful initiatives or outcomes that Parents Defending Education has achieved since its inception?

In 2021, we filed the public records requests that exposed collusion between the National School Board Association and the Biden Administration. Members of Congress and Senators called on both Attorney General Merrick Garland and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona to resign, and 26 state affiliates of the NSBA quit the national organization.

In the wake of the NSBA scandal, the Biden Administration created a “National Parents and Families Engagement Council” to give the impression that they actually wanted parental engagement. But in so doing, it violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act because it was neither transparent nor politically balanced. PDE sued the Education Department in partnership with our friends at America First Legal, and rather than addressing the Council’s deficiencies, the Administration chose to shutter the Council completely – showing that it was little more than a Potemkin village.

PDE successfully sued Wellesley Public Schools in Massachusetts over racially segregated affinity groups and First Amendment issues; the district agreed to revise its policies.

PDE successfully sued Linn-Mar Community Schools in Iowa over its parental exclusion and compelled speech policies; the state of Iowa passed a parental notification bill during our suit, but the Eighth Circuit ruled in our favor on speech grounds.

A California district’s plan to put a Planned Parenthood clinic into a local high school was tabled indefinitely after PDE exposed it.

To date, PDE has filed 37 civil rights complaints with the federal Office for Civil Rights; 9 investigations have been opened, 4 resolved when districts agreed to open the segregated programming to all students, and 2 referred to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).

Dozens of districts have retracted lesson plans after we’ve exposed them, including a Connecticut school walking back a “pizza and consent” lesson, the Los Angeles Unified School District removing posters that said “F*** the Police” and “F*** Amerikkka,” and a Virginia district removing “woke kindergarten” as a recommended resource.

Looking ahead, what are the key priorities or upcoming projects for Parents Defending Education in the coming year?

Thanks to our tip line and our relationships with parent organizations, we’re able to connect disparate stories to larger trends and identify problems on the horizon.

In the wake of last year’s Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard/UNC decision, we’re now watching education officials at all levels develop workarounds for racial preferences, which is absolutely an issue that will require attention in the future. School officials continue to treat students differently on the basis of race through the use of DEI hiring practices, segregated affinity groups and “healing circles,” because some education activists insist that students learn best from teachers with the same skin color.

Gender identity certainly isn’t going away any time soon – the new Title IX rules are going to be extensively litigated, and we believe they will eventually end up at the Supreme Court.

It’s important to remember that the antisemitism we’re seeing at universities didn’t magically occur when students first step onto college campuses; rather, that hatred is taught at far younger ages, through programs like ethnic studies and other curricula that frames human interaction through the lens of oppressor vs. oppressed.

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(NEW YORK POST) – The status of high school valedictorian is an honor that many parents may be thrilled to see their child achieve — but what if all of your kids are successful in clinching the title?

A central Florida family may have made history after all four daughters were named valedictorian in their respective high school classes — a feat that’s reportedly a 1 in an 11 billion chance.

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Tracey Rendina’s four girls — Ryleigh, age 18, Taylor, 20, Alisa, 22, and Makaley, 24 — all graduated from the same high school in different years and each one took home the coveted academic award.

Read the full story ›

Pro-Palestinian protesters

Jason Cohen
Daily Caller News Foundation

A state judge ordered on Friday thousands of striking academic employees at the University of California (UC) to pause their weeks-long effort protesting the Israel-Hamas war.

The strike commenced on May 20 at UC Santa Cruz and expanded to include six UC campuses, according to the university system’s website. Orange County Superior Court Judge Randall J. Sherman granted the restraining order request by UC lawyers who claimed the strike would inflict irreparable damage to students with finals approaching.

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“We are extremely grateful for a pause in this strike so our students can complete their academic studies,” associate vice president for Systemwide Labor Relations Melissa Matella said. “The strike would have caused irreversible setbacks to students’ academic achievements and may have stalled critical research projects in the final quarter.”

UC Santa Cruz Picket enters its 3rd day. #StandUpUC pic.twitter.com/O6hC7j9tKF

— UAW 4811 (@uaw_4811) May 22, 2024

The strike was carried out by the International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW), which represents over 40,000 employees throughout the UC system, according to its website. The union wants better treatment of its members who it says have been arrested and attacked while protesting “in solidarity with the people of Palestine.”

UC sued UAW and other union defendants on Tuesday, asking for the restraining order and alleging the union breached their contract.

“UAW’s rank and file members have … emphasized that their core objective for voting to strike is UAW’s political and social position,” the filing states. “For example, one member noted on X (Twitter) the international focus of the strike and made clear that the vote was about divestment and Palestine. Another pushed their department to vote for the strike stating ‘[T]he top demand that matters here is disinvestment. This is about Palestine first and our ability to work comfortably at UC second.’”

Universities have been facing pro-Palestinian protests for weeks, including students erecting encampments and taking over buildings in a bid to push schools to divest from Israel.

UAW did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

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(FOX NEWS) – A teachers union that represents employees in the Portland Public Schools (PPS) released a guide on how to teach anti-Israel views in schools.

Oregon Educators for Palestine, in association with the Portland Association of Teachers (PAT}, released the handbook, titled "Know Your Rights! Teaching & Organizing for Palestine Within Portland Public Schools," allegedly in response to teachers being censored and facing "discrimination and harassment" at "the hands of PPS District leadership." The handbook alleges that teachers were censored for "teaching about Palestine, posting pro-Palestine sentiments in schools, and even those wearing Pro-Palestine messages."

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They list examples of district censorship including of "student work on the topics of Settler Colonialism and Zionism" and staff members "wearing clothing with the phrase 'From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free,' claiming the phrase constituted hate speech and threatening to write up staff for insubordination if worn again."

Read the full story ›

A public interest organization, the Goldwater Institute, is taking issue with a "$140,000" college education in which students are told to "live like a bug."

But they are not taught the Constitution, the Civil War, or landmark Supreme Court cases.

It's part of colleges' abandonment of core educational missions in favor of indoctrination into "diversity, equity, and inclusion" discrimination programs.

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"The situation is particularly grim at the University of Arizona, where a real assignment in a course that fulfills the 'Diversity and Equity' (D&E) core curriculum requirement instructs students to 'live like a bug' by 'walking around with tissue paper 'wings'' so they can better understand the experience of 'marginalized' groups," the institute explains.

The organization recently completed a report on the ideological agenda being pushed in schools.

It revealed students are being required to believe "racism is deeply embedded in U.S. history, society, and institutions," and that "white people hold unearned privilege while people of color have not had equal access to the 'American Dream.'"

And, students are told to apologize if they say something and someone else objects.

"Resist the temptation to become defensive. Instead, apologize, self-reflect, learn, and do better next time," they are told.

"A course on the science of bugs that fulfills the D&E requirement requires students to experiment with 'living like a bug'—including by 'walking around with tissue paper 'wings''—in order to understand the experience of immigrants, people of a different social class, and other 'marginalized' groups," the report found.

Goldwater explained, "For years, leftists have plotted to turn colleges into breeding grounds for activists by infusing the poisonous ideas of DEI into every aspect of campus life, from admissions to faculty hiring to classroom indoctrination.

"In recent weeks, the consequences of this scheme became all too clear. College campuses turned into hotbeds for mob violence, unprovoked assaults, and anti-Semitic calls for terrorism and genocide—all while Jewish students were forced to live in fear as their schools refuse to protect their rights. Sadly, it should come as no surprise that the same intolerant campus leftists who can’t stomach conservative speakers have decided Jewish students are 'oppressors' who deserve to be harassed, or worse."

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Audrey Hale shot and killed six people, including three children, at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, on March 27. (@nypost / Twitter)

Harold Hutchison
Daily Caller News Foundation

Writings of the transgender shooter who attacked a private school in Nashville reportedly included fantasies of an imaginary penis and descriptions of simulated bestiality sessions that would last hours, according to The Tennessee Star.

The Star obtained writings from Audrey Hale, the 28-year-old female shooter who identified as transgender, who killed three children and three adults at Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, before being engaged and fatally wounded by law enforcement March 27, 2023. The writings were retrieved from Hale’s vehicle, The Tennessee Star reported.

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“My penis exists in my head,” Hale wrote in a three-page essay called “My Imaginary Penis,” according to The Star. “I swear to god I’m a male.”

Hale also described instances in her writings where she would have a male human doll simulate sexual activity with a stuffed animal, getting so involved in the fantasies that she would miss gym, The Star reported.

In other writings, Hale wrote that she was “born wrong” and “my body does not make me a female,” The Star reported.

Hale also wrote about the time “I leave my body behind and the boy in me will be free; in the butterfly transformation” and added, “If God won’t give me a boy body in heaven, then Jesus is a f*****.”

Portions of Hale’s writings were leaked to conservative media figure Steven Crowder in November, prompting an investigation by authorities that led to seven officers being assigned to administrative duties. The Metro Nashville Police Department opposed the release of the writings.

The FBI also opposed release of Hale’s writings in a May 2023 memo also obtained by The Tennessee Star.

“Public access to legacy tokens will also facilitate false narratives and inaccurate information. For personal gain, self-professed ‘experts’ will proffer their perspectives on the motivations behind the attack,” the memo read. “Many of these pontificators will be inexperienced or untrained, and therefore inaccurate in their assessment, further confusing or potentially inflaming the public. This also may lead to unintended consequences for the segment of the population more vulnerable or open to conspiracy theories, which will undoubtedly abound.”

President Joe Biden, Congressional Democrats, media figures and celebrities demanded a ban on so-called “assault weapons” in the wake of the shooting.

The Metro Nashville Police Department declined to comment when contacted by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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(JUST THE NEWS) – A new parents bill of rights took effect Thursday in Washington, but State Superintendent of Public Instruction Chris Reykdal is telling school districts to ignore it.

The measure approved by lawmakers back in March was introduced by a voter initiative. Supporters said it was a way to ensure parents don’t feel left out of their child’s education and, among other things, have access to medical or counseling records if children are questioning gender identity or sexual orientation.

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During a March public hearing on the bill, Jennifer Heine-Withee, with the Family Policy Institute, listed stories of parents who felt their rights were ignored by teachers and schools across the state, including children being taught about race, gender pronouns and sexuality.

Read the full story ›

By Zineb Williams
Daily Caller News Foundation

A college in New York will launch a program in the spring 2025 semester designed to teach “gender-diverse individuals” how to sneeze, cough and change their voices to “match their identities.”

Russell Sage College’s “Gender-Affirming Voice Program” will also teach attendees to “explore aspects of voice, like pitch, inflection, resonance, articulation, and loudness,” according to its website. The program is based on a similar initiative by The College of Saint Rose, and it will include 10 two-hour long sessions during each semester.

“We provide participants with the opportunity to explore their voice and communication goals in a safe, welcoming small group environment,” the website reads.

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The training will cover both language and nonverbal communication, according to the website. It will also include activities such as practicing “mindfulness” and “gratitude,” as well as small groups that “that promote the exploration of voice and communication.”

Several other universities have adopted similar initiatives.

The Colorado State University Health Organization organized workshops in 2023 on vocal feminization and masculinization for transgender and nonbinary students at no cost. The University of Wisconsin-Madison also funded a similar effort in February of last year.

Russell Sage College did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

This story originally was published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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(FOX NEWS) – A New York State school district apologized for using "exclusionary language" to promote an event for "students of color" after an anti-affirmative action group accused the educators of segregating students.

The Ithaca City School District (ICSD) promoted a Students of Color Summit 2024 on Ithaca High School’s campus that said the event was for "Students of Color in grades 6-12." The Equal Protection Project (EPP), a nonprofit that opposes racial discrimination in any form, caught wind of this and sent a scathing letter to Superintendent Dr. Luvelle Brown and Board of Education President Dr. Sean Eversley Bradwell.

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The letter, which has been obtained by Fox News Digital, featured an image of a poster used to promote the ICSD event which noted "students of color" were invited. The letter suggested that school board officials preserve records related to the event because a FOIL request would be served, and claimed an email was circulated by staffers stating that the event was "for students of color to interact with each other" and that "allies" are not invited.

Read the full story ›

By Kate Anderson
Daily Caller News Foundation

Ahead of the impending implementation of President Joe Biden’s latest student loan forgiveness plan, a new report published Wednesday alleges that the program is illegal and defies congressional authority.

Biden’s Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan is an income-driven repayment program that will cost an estimated $156 billion over the course of ten years and will go into full effect on July 1, according to Politico. A new report from DFI, a nonprofit focused on educational and labor policies, however, claims that the president’s plan is “illegal” and has “claimed legal authority far outside what Congress intended” when it approved the ability for the secretary of education to forgive limited amounts of student debt via income payments.

“Congress intended income-driven repayment to be a flexible repayment option with a last-resort loan forgiveness benefit that imposed negligible costs on taxpayers,” Jason Delisle, the report’s author, said in a press release. “The Biden administration’s SAVE plan runs roughshod over those intentions, and it may not survive pending legal challenges as a result.”

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The SAVE plan sets payments based on 5% of an undergraduate’s income and also eliminates unpaid interest each month, according to the report. Total loan forgiveness can occur as soon as ten years into the program for those with debt under $12,000, whereas previously the plans required 20 to 25 years of payments before loan forgiveness was approved.

The report argues that when Congress approved income-driven repayments for student loans it did not intend for participants to “have balances canceled after 10 to 20 years of repayment, including months when their payments were $0.”

“Lawmakers did not originally intend for loan forgiveness to be a major benefit of income-driven plans and intended borrowers to repay for 20 or 25 years before having debt canceled,” the report states.

Additionally, the report claims that the law was initially intended to apply only to “low-income students” but that the Biden administration has done away with this provision and allowed the forgiveness to extend to students well into the middle and upper-middle class.

The Supreme Court struck down the administration’s previous attempt to enact widespread student loan relief for 40 million Americans in June 2023, ruling that the secretary of education did not have emergency authority to cancel student debt through the Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions (HEROES) Act.

“It’s a pattern with this administration to stretch the law to the breaking point, and then hope both that Congress will be gridlocked and unable to respond and that no one will challenge them successfully in the courts,” Jim Blew, a co-founder of DFI, said in the press release. “We hope the courts, if not Congress, will let the administration know it cannot create a plan like SAVE and use federal student aid to buy votes and cater to special interests.”

The Department of Education did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

This story originally was published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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Large numbers of schools across America, run by leftists trained in the LGBT agenda, have adopted schemes to promote those alternative lifestyle choices to children – and keep the details a secret from parents.

It's a campaign that Wisconsin parents now are challenging before the U.S. Supreme Court.

A report at The Federalist explains the fight is from the Eau Claire district.

The report describes the district's gender-identity policy as "a big middle finger to the basic principles of parental rights."

Thus, the fight by parents.

The petition to the Supreme Court was filed by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty and America First Legal asking for intervention in the fight.

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It is in "Parents Protecting Our Children v. Eau Claire Area School District."

There, school officials are accused of facilitating "gender identity transitions at school" amid schemes to keep this hidden from parents."

Lower courts claimed parents weren't injured by the practice.

The report noted, however, "the parents are directly affected by the pro-transgender policy, WILL notes in the appeal to the Supreme Court. It’s a policy of secrecy that could keep them in the dark about a matter of urgent parental concern. And the erosion of parental rights through similar school policies is happening nationwide, the court filing asserts."

Luke Berg, deputy counsel for WILL, said, "Thousands of school districts across our country have these policies. If parents cannot challenge them until after their children are harmed, they have no way to protect their kids other than pulling them from public school."

The question facing the court is, "When a school district adopts an explicit policy to usurp parental decision-making authority over a major health-related decision — and to conceal this from the parents — do parents who are subject to such a policy have standing to challenge it?"

The filing charges that education industry officials in public schools now have made school "like Las Vegas: 'What happens at school stays at school.'"

The Eau Claire district boasts it wants to have "inclusive and welcoming environments that are free from discrimination, harassment, and bullying regardless of sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression."

To that end, the school has teachers ask students what they want to be called as well as what bathroom and locker room facilities the students wish to use.

They also are to ask about what "transition plan," involving social, medical and surgical components, the students adopt.

The report noted the issue exploded into the national conversation when a staff member at Eau Claire North High posted a sign, "If Your Parents Aren’t Accepting Of Your Identity I’m Your Mom Now."

Teachers had been instructed that parents "are not entitled" to know some details about their own children.

Board president Tim Nordin openly has doubled down on the campaign, that it is "within the rights of the students and families."

But the facts are that parents have primary rights in the lives of their children, and the legal teams point out that courts have decided over and over that parents have a "fundamental constitutional right to make decisions concerning the rearing" of their own children.

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(JUST THE NEWS) – Clearance of a North Carolina teen’s academic record for saying “illegal aliens” in a classroom setting is sought in a preliminary injunction filed Tuesday.

Christian McGhee, a 16-year-old at Central Davidson High in Lexington, and his parents Leah and Chad McGhee, sued the Davidson County School District Board of Education. The lawsuit filed May 7 seeks full clearance and removal of the mark on the student’s record, and Tuesday’s filing asks the court to order the school to reverse the suspension.

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The newest action also introduces excerpts of a recording involving a school administrator, who equated the phrase “illegal alien” to “the n-word.” Also in the recording, Assistant Principal Eric Anderson told the mother, Leah McGhee, her son should have said “those people that need a green card.” Anderson described the teacher by using the word “struggled,” and said it was because of “being so young and female.”

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(NEW YORK POST) – A Wisconsin father was caught on camera shoving aside a school administrator to stop him from shaking his daughter’s hand during her high school graduation — an incident some are saying appears racially charged.

“That’s my daughter,” the father, who is white, was heard saying as he leaped to the graduation stage and shoved aside Baraboo School District Superintendent Rainey Briggs, who is black, in late May. “I don’t want her touching him,” the father continued in the footage as he pushed Briggs aside – just moments before his daughter was to shake his hand as she received her diploma.

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Briggs was heard telling the father to take his hands off him, while the daughter and others on stage looked on with alarm and confusion. The father was escorted out of the building and was later charged with disorderly conduct, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

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(MODERNITY) – A school in Switzerland has controversially announced it will trial tracking wristbands on children to keep tabs on their location.

As highlighted by Remix News, Swiss outlet Neue Zürcher Zeitung reports that the Letten after-school care centre in Birmensdorf will require kids to wear the Bluetooth tech at all times during care hours unless parents specifically opt out.

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The wristbands will track the wearers, with staff being alerted should a pupil wander outside the sanctioned location without prior authorization. The justification given for the tracking is that the number of children in the facility is always changing and that it is necessary to provide “high quality care.”

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(DAILY WIRE) – A former Yale University student who was accused of sexual assault but acquitted at trial is suing 15 women’s organizations he says defamed him after the verdict.

Saifullah Khan was found not guilty in March 2018 but was subsequently expelled from Yale anyway. He sued the university and his accuser – and is now suing women’s organizations he says defamed him in post-verdict filings.

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While suing Yale and his accuser, who has not been named in court or the media, the 15 organizations applied to file an amicus brief with the Connecticut Supreme Court. The filing included a proposed brief, which Khan says included “several false and defamatory statements.”

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Robert Schmad
Daily Caller News Foundation

Interviews conducted by The New York Times with former staff at Ibram X. Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University paint a picture of financial mismanagement, paranoia and sloppy administrative practices.

Kendi founded the Center for Antiracist Research in June 2020 following the death of George Floyd and, concurrent with a wave of activism sweeping the country, his center was showered with tens of millions of dollars from liberal philanthropists to fulfill its mission. Just a year later, however, fundraising dried up, staffers were voicing discontent and the center was in a state of administrative disarray, paving the way for its decline, the NYT reported.

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Before founding the center, Kendi rose to prominence for popularizing the idea that all actions are either racist or “anti-racist,” positing that indifference to purportedly racist policies is itself a form of racism. Kendi says he founded the Center for Antiracist Research to address the “seemingly intractable problems of racial inequity and injustice” in the United States, according to the NYT.

Kendi marketed a bold vision, seeking to create a comprehensive repository of data tracking the impact of purportedly racist policies across the country, the NYT reported. Donors flocked to Kendi and his ideas, dumping $40 million into his center in 2020.

Counted among donors to Kendi’s project were big players like George Soros’ Foundation to Promote Open Society, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Faith in Kendi’s project dried up fast however, with donations dropping to just $420,000 in 2021 as the willingness of donors to pay for racial justice initiatives dropped sharply after 2020, according to the NYT.

By 2021, Kendi was feeling like a failure, a sentiment he shared with Yanique Redwood as he was interviewing her to become the center’s executive director, the NYT reported.

Kendi ultimately gave Redwood the job, according to the NYT. Prior to starting her new role, Redwood conducted a series of interviews with the center’s staff, after the end of which she reported being worn out by all the frustration she encountered.

Staff, for instance, complained about being required to take on jobs they were neither hired to do nor qualified to complete.

“Everyone was overwhelmed,” Redwood told the NYT. “There were too many promises being made to funders. Products were being promised that could never be delivered.”

Staffers also told Redwood they were unsure of what the center’s specific mission even was. Once she actually started her job, Redwood uncovered total disorganization when examining the center’s finances.

“Nothing was in place,” she told the NYT. “It was unbelievable that an institution like that, with so much spotlight on it, just did not have systems. I understood why I was being brought in.”

In an attempt to rectify the confusion and frustration brewing at his center, Redwood advised Kendi to hold a retreat so his staff could air their grievances, the NYT reported.

During the retreat, Saida Grundy, a sociologist, accused Kendi’s vision of social change of being “a mile wide and an inch deep” and argued that the center needed a more specific goal than just “fighting racism,” according to the NYT. Several staff members agreed.

Early in the center’s history, stakeholders had attempted to dissuade Kendi from creating an all-encompassing repository of anti-racist data, urging him instead to constrain his focus to avoid sloppy data, overburdened staff and unoriginal work, the NYT reported. Kendi ignored their advice.

Research output at Kendi’s antiracism center was low, having produced just two pieces of original academic research between its founding and November 2023.

In addition to his inability to put forward a coherent vision for the center, staff also complained about what they viewed as paranoia on part of Kendi.

When the center began the 2021 academic year on Boston University’s campus, for instance, Kendi sent staff an email detailing “security protocols,” one of which instructed employees to not disclose the location of the center, according to the NYT. The email even included a script staffers were to use when asked about the center’s address.

“The paranoia is INSANE,” Grundy wrote to colleagues after forwarding them Kendi’s security email.

Redwood told the NYT that Kendi had been engaging in “secrecy and paranoid behavior.”

Kendi viewed himself as the primary target of right-wing activists and white supremacists, making him feel the security protocols were necessary.

Kendi was also apprehensive about information about the center leaking to the press, leading to some friction with staff, according to the NYT. One staffer, for instance, claims that he put off giving her information about the center’s finances for six months. Other staffers also reported that Kendi tended to withhold information to avoid conflicts.

Many of these conflicts came to a head when Kendi agreed on behalf of the center to partner with the diversity, equity and inclusion arms of the consulting firm Deloitte, according to the NYT. Staff were upset due to not being consulted over the decision and because Deloitte contracts for police departments and prisons.

“Why wasn’t this shared with the broader staff sooner, as a potential high-risk partnership that could impact the relationships we are forging with movement leaders?” one staffer said. “Why are we contemplating this partnership that arguably goes against our values?”

Kendi pushed back against these concerns by characterizing payments from corporations as a “form of reparations” and claiming that they would have total control over the products delivered to the consulting firm, according to the NYT. He called his detractors at the center “performative radicals.”

Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research has since pivoted away from its initially lofty goals to serve primarily as a conduit for academic fellowships, firing 19 of its 36 employees in September 2023, according to the NYT.

“In hindsight, and with the fuller knowledge of the organizational problems that arose, the university should have done more to insist on additional oversight,” a Boston University spokesperson told the NYT.

Boston University investigated the Center for Antiracist Research for mismanagement in 2023 though ultimately found no issues regarding its finances. The center faces an ongoing cultural inquiry, the NYT reported.

Boston University did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Violence erupts at UCLA amid anti-Israel protests on Tuesday, April 30, 2024.

College campuses in the United States became the scene of pro-Palestinian "protests" starting immediately after Hamas terrorists from Gaza invaded Israel and butchered some 1,200 civilians, often through horrific torture like burning whole families together, last Oct. 7.

Now two of the organizations that orchestrated those "protests" are being sued.

For being propagandists for those Hamas terrorists.

A report from CBN explains the lawsuit filed in Virginia accuses American Muslims for Palestine and National Students for Justice in Palestine, both of whom espouse anti-Semitic views, of collaborating with Hamas terrorists to be their "propaganda division" in America.

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Arsen Ostrovsky, of the Jerusalem-based International Legal Forum, told CBN, "These groups are the primary drivers of what we're seeing happening across campuses in the United States, which have effectively become a second front Hamas since October seventh."

He is working in conjunction with Greenberg, Traurig, a U.S. legal team, and the National Jewish Advocacy Group.

"They are acting and serving in collaboration and coordination with Hamas, essentially as propagandists and collaborators on campus to try and promote the Hamas extremist ideology," he said.

Anti-Semitic "demonstrations" began at Columbia University right after Hamas' terror attack on Israel, and have spread from coast to coast.

Anti-Israel protests at Columbia University on Sunday, April 21, 2024

"Hamas issued a call to action. And the very next day, SJP and their affiliates throughout the United States – they answered that call. They answered that directive. They created a toolkit, a manifesto for chapters across the United States, echoing the language, the terminology, the instructions by the Hamas terror group, and propagated that across campuses," Ostrovsky explained to CBN.

The cases charges that those groups have become foot soldiers for Hamas.

"There are nine plaintiffs, including Americans and Israelis as well," Ostrovsky said, seeking compensation for the damages done.

They include victims and survivors of the Nova massacre.

The legal fight includes the goal of shutting down the groups by documenting their violations of the U.S. Anti-Terrorism Act.

"They are the ones fomenting the hatred, the anti-Semitism, the harassment of Jewish students," Ostrovsky said. "We need to shut them down. And we can do that legally by branding them as a terrorist organization, as a collaborator of the Hamas terror group, and making sure once and for all they cannot be active on campus."

Muslim terrorists with Hamas fire a barrage of rockets against Israel on Saturday, Oct. 7, 2023

He said ultimately the fight will be not only on physical battlefields, but also in courtrooms.

"Today what we're seeing is that the state of Israel is being demonized and vilified and delegitimized and painted as a pariah. Where we're seeing the international law not only being misused but being turned into an act of lawfare against us for the simple act of defending our citizens, trying to bring back our captives," Ostrovsky stated.

He said not only to terrorists in Hamas need to be held accountable, so do those who enable the agenda, that support them.

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(THE COLLEGE FIX) -- The president of Sonoma State University retired after a suspension for cutting a deal with pro-Palestinian activists.

President Ming-Tung “Mike” Lee agreed to “divestment strategies,” in order to end an encampment on campus. However, he did so without proper approval, leading to his suspension for “insubordination,” according to Chancellor Mildred Garcia.

“That message was sent without the appropriate approvals,” the announcement stated.

Read the full story ›

Gov. Jared Polis, D-Colo., performs his own rendition of 'Feliz Navidad' on Christmas Eve 2023

For at least the third time, the state of Colorado's anti-Christian agenda has been cited – and condemned – by the federal courts.

The latest ruling said the state broke the law by excluding Catholic preschools from a universal preschool program – solely because those schools consider religious affiliate in making enrollment decisions.

It is the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty that explained a federal court ruling cites the state's illegal exclusion of those preschools from a program that funds 15 hours per week of free preschool to more than 40,000 families.

During its first year, it benefited families with children in private, public and faith-based preschools.

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But leftist activists inside the state's bureaucracy refused to authorize benefits to families who sent their children to St. Mary's and St. Bernadette's Catholic preschools because those institutions ask families to share their Catholic beliefs.

The court found, in its 101-page opinion, that the state's discrimination "created an unworkable scheme that breaches the appropriate limits on state power."

The court found the state had "no compelling interest" in its discriminatory policy.

"Last year, a different federal judge in Denver also issued a ruling against the state, in a case brought by a separate religious preschool raising similar claims," Becket reported.

"Of course a Catholic school shouldn’t be punished for caring about its students’ religion," explained Nick Reaves, a Becket lawyer. "Colorado richly deserves this injunction, as it did the earlier one."

The schools explained the state's discrimination violated the Free Exercise, Free Speech and Establishment clauses of the First Amendment.

Integral to the state's agenda is that it demands schools incorporate sexual orientation and gender identity ideologies into their programs. The state has plunged headfirst into that ideology since the election of homosexual Gov. Jared Polis.

The judge said, "The department has allowed faith-based providers to deny children and families equal opportunity based on their religious affiliation, or lack thereof, and has cited no compelling interest for permitting that discrimination while denying plaintiffs’ request for a related exemption. On that narrow basis, I conclude defendants have violated plaintiffs’ free-exercise rights and that judgment in favor of plaintiffs is warranted. I consequently grant Plaintiffs relief in the form of a limited permanent injunction, declaratory judgment, and nominal damages."

It ruled, "The court immediately and permanently enjoins defendants Lisa Roy and Dawn Odean, acting in their official capacities on behalf of the Colorado Department of Early Childhood, from requiring, as a condition for participation in the Colorado Universal Preschool Program, that the preschools operated by plaintiffs St. Mary Catholic Parish in Littleton and St. Bernadette Catholic Parish in Lakewood agreed to provide or provide eligible children an equal opportunity to enroll and receive preschool services regardless of religious affiliation for as long as defendants allow exceptions from the religious affiliation aspect of the equal-opportunity requirement set out in [state law] and in the Colkorado Universial Preschool Program Service Agreement.

The defendants were ordered to pay $1 nominal damages.

The total hasn't been announced, but Colorado taxpayers likely won't get off so easily in the attacks on Christianity earlier, under the administration of Polis.

It recently lost the 303 Creative case at the U.S. Supreme Court.

There, state officials demanded that a Christian web designer follow the state's anti-Christian "non-discrimination" mandate and promote events that violated the web designer's faith.

A judge recently ruled that the state – the taxpayers – must pay the costs and fees for the plaintiff in that caser.

Such cases, by the time they are all the way through the high court, can accumulate tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of dollars in lawyers' time and costs.

The leftist state's failed attack was on Lorie Smith and her 303 Creative company, through which she intended to create websites for couples being married.

However, the state demanded that should she begin that service, she also must provide the same services to same-sex duos, in violation of her Christian faith.

She sued for the First Amendment violation demanded by the state, and won.

The state earlier lost a similar battle with Jack Phillips, owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop, who challenged the state's "non-discrimination" plan that also would require him to promote ideologies that violate his Christian faith.

In that case, the Supreme Court specifically cited Colorado's "hostility" to Christianity under Polis.

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(ALGEMEINER) -- In May, the Zine club at North Carolina’s Carrboro High School made a post on social media celebrating their display in the school’s library that included the Do-It-Yourself Occupation Guide, which reads as a training manual for criminality and domestic terrorism.

The guide provides advice on how to disable alarm systems, break into buildings, and barricade doors. It calls for “organized looting” and “the seizing of buildings.” With accompanying pictures, the guide explains how to use tools such as an angle grinder, bolt cutters, and a crowbar to break into buildings. It advises, “A group may decide it is better to destroy or vandalize a space than to return it to its usual role in good condition.” In its first paragraph, the guide accuses Israel of “genocide” against the Palestinians.

The guide was removed from the library.

Read the full story ›

(THE COLLEGE FIX) -- The University of Pennsylvania now employs a vice provost solely focused on climate change.

The “Vice Provost for Climate Science, Policy, and Action” is tasked with “support[ing] Penn’s leadership in addressing the climate crisis,” according to the campus newspaper.

“This would include responsibilities such as implementing the campus-wide Climate and Sustainability Action Plan, leading academic programs in climate science and policy and enhancing education and training focused on climate mitigation and adaptation,” The Daily Pennsylvanian reported.

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(THE COLLEGE FIX) -- Michigan State University currently has more than 140 employees working on 222 different “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” agenda items.

The salaries for those employees, some of whom work on DEI full-time, totals more than $18 million dollars according to a College Fix analysis. One of these goals included an “inclusive language” guide that instructed university employees not to say “America” or use Easter and Christmas imagery.

The Fix pulled the data from the latest “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” report for the public university in Lansing and used salary information from the school and government watchdog group Open the Books. In a few cases, The Fix estimated the salary for some employees based on the lowest salaries for personnel in comparable positions.

Read the full story ›

Katy Perry

(FAITHWIRE) -- Over the weekend, pop singer Katy Perry posted an edited version of Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker’s recent commencement address, during which he criticized President Joe Biden, so-called “Pride month,” and LGBT lifestyles.

Perry, a former judge on ABC’s “American Idol,” seemingly took issue with some of the LGBT-related comments Butker made during his mid-May graduation speech at Benedictine College, a small Catholic school in Atchison, Kansas.

 

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A post shared by KATY PERRY (@katyperry)

The part of Butker’s address that garnered the most attention centered on his statements about women. He told the female graduates gathered for commencement that, ultimately, careers will be unfulfilling in comparison to becoming wives and mothers.

(See the original, unedited speech:)

Read the full story ›

Anti-Israel protests at Columbia University on Sunday, April 21, 2024

By Kate Anderson
Daily Caller News Foundation

A Columbia University alum has decided to ditch his alma mater by giving a $260 million donation to an Israeli university as protests continue to plague the ivy league college’s campus, according to a Monday announcement.

The donation was given to Bar-Ilan University in Israel, a public research university, by an American Jewish donor who was active in World War II, according to the announcement from Bar-Ilan’s President Prof. Arie Zaban during a Board of Trustees meeting. The donor, who wished to remain anonymous, formerly attended Columbia, which has been rocked by weeks of pro-Palestinian protests that have led to arrests and violent clashes with police.

“The donor, a man of broad academic education, believed that the development of Israel’s technological resilience relies primarily on breakthrough science,” Zaban said in the announcement. “During his visits to Israel, he recognized the significant impact Bar-Ilan University has made in key areas thanks to its science-based infrastructure and deep connections to all sectors of Israeli society.”

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The donation will be used to develop “Deep Tech sciences” in the “energy, environment, cryptography, bio-convergence, quantum, AI, and natural language processing” fields, according to the announcement.

“We have a mission,” Zaban told the university’s board, according to the announcement. “Today, more than ever, Israel needs support and investment in its science and human capital. Our research-driven technological resilience is the key to a thriving society and economy.”

Amid weeks of tension on American university campuses, centering largely around Columbia, pro-Palestinian protesters have demanded that the university completely divest from Israel in opposition to its war with the terrorist organization Hamas. Columbia was forced to cancel their main commencement ceremony in May due to safety concerns and ongoing protests and police just recently broke up another encampment on school grounds over the weekend.

Other universities have also been chastised by donors for allowing the protests to get out of hand. Barry Sternlicht, a real estate mogul, called out his alma mater, Brown University, in May for conceding to protesters by agreeing to discuss divestment options, according to The New York Times.

Top donors to Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania also threatened to pull donations in protest of the universities’ administrations’ tepid response to the protests, according to CNN.

Columbia declined to comment.

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(THE COLLEGE FIX) -- A math professor’s two-year-old lawsuit against Saint Joseph’s University, filed in the wake of controversy over his social media posts criticizing slavery reparations and other comments, continues to wind its way through the court system.

Gregory Manco sued the institution he taught at for nearly two decades, as well as coached baseball for, alleging some administrators conspired with a few left-leaning alumni to effectively “cancel” him over tweets that ran afoul of progressive dogma.

The ordeal launched after an alumnus who received an “F” in Manco’s class back in 2017 discovered four years later that the mathematician tweeted from a then-anonymous “South Jersey Giants” Twitter account, the lawsuit alleges.

Read the full story ›

U.S. Air Force Academy cadet Sarah Willis competes on beam at a women's gymnastics meet in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Friday, Feb. 9, 2024. (U.S. Air Force photo by Rayna Grace)

(THE COLLEGE FIX) -- The University of Washington Medical Center’s chief of medicine recently said that “science alone can’t solve the fairness debate on transgender athletes.”

According to The Spokesman-Review, endocrinologist Bradley Anawat claimed “there can be no scientific answer to what is fair […] there is never going to be a perfect answer and there is always going to be some level of controversy” regarding trans-female athletes.

Anawat noted sex-related athletic differences come about during puberty when those who experience “testosterone-based puberty” (aka boys) gain advantages over those who go through “estrogen-based puberty” (aka girls).

Read the full story ›

By Kate Anderson
Daily Caller News Foundation

Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) announced Monday to staff that it was changing its hiring requirements to no longer include a diversity, inclusion and belonging statement, according to the Boston Globe.

FAS, which is the university’s largest department, has required diversity statements for new hires for the past five years, according to the Boston Globe. Staff and faculty learned this week, however, that the school was dropping the requirement and would now ask applicants to tenure-track positions for a “service statement” that “describes efforts to strengthen academic communities, e.g. department, institution, and/or professional societies.”

Randall Kennedy, a professor at Harvard Law School, wrote in an op-ed for the Harvard Crimson, a student newspaper, in April that he believed it was time for the university to do away with the requirement.

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“Candidates for academic positions at Harvard should not be asked to support ideological commitments,” Kennedy wrote. “Imagine the howl of protest that would (or should) erupt if a school at Harvard asked a candidate for a faculty position to submit a statement of their orientation towards capitalism, or patriotism, or Making America Great Again with a clear expectation of allegiance? Such pressure constitutes an encroachment upon the intellectual freedom that ought to be part of the enjoyment of academic life.”

NEW: Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences has dropped its “diversity, inclusion, and belonging” statement requirement for faculty hiring, per an email sent today. They’ll ask for a service statement instead.

Institutions are backing away from diversity statements. pic.twitter.com/wUYrbfhLFY

— John Sailer (@JohnDSailer) June 3, 2024

Many schools have faced criticism over their diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies in recent months, and some have made similar decisions to Harvard’s by eliminating their diversity regulations and departments. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) also banned diversity statements in applications for faculty in April, with President Sally Kornbluth previously telling the Daily Caller News Foundation that “compelled statements impinge on freedom of expression.”

FSA did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

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(INDEPENDENT SENTINEL) – The daughter of The View” co-host Sunny Hostin celebrated her graduation from her $63,000-a-year New York City prep school, wishing for the complete destruction of Israel. She was mocking her Jewish peers. For a member of the Democrat elite who always scream about alleged Republican hate, this is the real hate.

“Now that I got my diploma: FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA, PALESTINE WILL BE FREE,” Paloma Hostin wrote in a Snapchat post obtained and shared on X by StopAntisemitism. That expression clearly calls for the destruction of Israel and the death of any Jew to make it happen.

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“And to all the mfs who screenshotted my stories and showed them to your parents trying to get me suspended or expelled, look at me now,” she continued.

Read the full story ›

(NEW YORK POST) – One of the top private schools in the country has “devolved” into a “hotbed of Jew-hate,” parents charge. A Jewish student who graduated from the Ethical Fieldston School in the Bronx was tormented by classmates calling him an “ethnic cleaner” and a “colonizer” and even witnessed a teacher give rabbis the middle finger at an assembly, according to his mom.

“Fieldston is a hotbed of Jew-hate and these terror-supporting students are the epitome of the ‘trigger warning’ generation,” Dr. Logan Levkoff said in an Instagram post.

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Levkoff’s Tuesday post came in response to a student letter that defended a classmate accused of vandalizing the school with anti-Israel graffiti and bashed Jewish parents. It claimed the parents were “intimidating” them and “suppressing” ideas not in line with “Zionist ideology.”

Read the full story ›

(NEW YORK POST) – It’s the preeminent civil rights issue of our day: the protection of girls in women’s sports. Last month’s stolen victory by a male runner in the girls’ 400-meter dash at the Washington state championships underscores a heightened sense of urgency for current and future generations of female athletes.

Lauren Matthew, West Valley School District’s top-seeded runner, is just the latest young woman to lose a title to a mediocre male claiming to be female. Naturally, the boy secured the championship by one second.

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It follows a similar victory over 100-meter gold medalist Aster Jones by a male runner in the girls’ 200-meter race in Oregon – another girl who, like Matthew, deserves to be recognized as the rightful champion in her state.

Read the full story ›

(THE COLLEGE FIX) – An academic journal has reversed course and rejected an article about abortion that it initially accepted, citing concerns about the author being a “white” “male,” according to an email from the editor obtained by The College Fix.

The article “Abortion Restrictions are Good for Black Women” by philosopher Perry Hendricks initially was accepted for publication earlier this year in The New Bioethics. However, the journal’s editors put it on hold after an abstract received criticism on social media. Now, Hendricks told The Fix the journal has rejected it.

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Editor Matthew James told Hendricks in a May 23 email that the journal rescinded its decision to publish his piece after a second peer review process, according to screenshots of the email Hendricks shared with The Fix.

Read the full story ›

Cops storm Columbia University university, bust 100 anti-Israel protesters

(NEW YORK POST) – Students at Columbia University set up a new anti-Israel encampment on campus Friday night as the school hosts alumni weekend.

The defiant demonstrators — members of Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine — set up camp on the Manhattan campus’ south lawns alongside a giant white party tent already in place for the alumni event festivities that end Saturday. “We’re back b****es,” declared one sign the protesters put up, video from the New York Times shows.

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Another banner redesignated the area – for the third time – a “Liberated Zone.” Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine confirmed the latest encampment at the Ivy League school in a Friday night social media post.

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(GOOD MORNING AMERICA) – When 11-year-old Luke was getting ready to be adopted, he made one special request which was to invite his fourth-grade class at Brookland Middle School in Brookland, Arkansas, to watch his adoption get finalized in court.

"I told my attorney that it would be really necessary for my class to see my adoption. So I was really excited about just having my class be part of where I'm heading next, you know?" the Arkansas boy told "Good Morning America."

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Luke's May 14 adoption was the culmination of months of bonding, a process he and his parents, Cassie and Bradley Kissinger, said was nearly instantaneous after they first met at a "connection event" hosted by Project Zero, an Arkansas nonprofit dedicated to promoting adoption.

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Stanford University

[Editor's note: This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire.]

By Ben Weingarten
Real Clear Wire

This summer the Supreme Court will rule on a case involving what a district court called perhaps "the most massive attack against free speech" ever inflicted on the American people. In Murthy v. Missouri, plaintiffs ranging from the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana to epidemiologists from Harvard and Stanford allege that the federal government violated the First Amendment by working with outside groups and social media platforms to surveil, flag, and quash dissenting speech – characterizing it as mis-, dis- and mal-information – on issues ranging from COVID-19 to election integrity.

The case has helped shine a light on a sprawling network of government agencies and connected NGOs that critics describe as a censorship industrial complex. That the U.S. government might aggressively clamp down on protected speech, and, certainly at the scale of millions of social media posts, may constitute a recent development. Reporting by RCI and other outlets – including Racket News' new "Censorship Files" series, and continuing installments of the "Twitter Files" series to which it, Public, and others have contributed – and congressional probes continue to reveal the substantial breadth and depth of contemporary efforts to quell speech that authorities deem dangerous. But the roots of what some have dubbed the censorship industrial complex stretch back decades, born of an alliance between government, business, and academia that Democrat Sen. William Fulbright termed the "military-industrial-academic-complex" – building on President Eisenhower's formulation – in a 1967 speech.

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RCI reviewed public records and court documents and interviewed experts to trace the origins and evolution of the government's allegedly unconstitutional censorship efforts. It is a rich history that includes the battles to defeat America's adversaries in World War II and the Cold War; the development of Silicon Valley; the post-9/11 War on Terror; the Obama administration's transition to targeting domestic violent extremism broadly; and the rise of Donald Trump.

If there is one ever-present player in this saga, it is the storied institution of Stanford University. Its idyllic campus has served as the setting over the last 70-plus years for a pivotal public-private partnership linking academia, business, and the national security apparatus. Stanford's central place, particularly in developing technologies to thwart the Soviet Union during the Cold War, would persist and evolve through the decades, leading to the creation of an entity called the Stanford Internet Observatory that would serve as the chief cutout – in critics' eyes – for government-driven censorship in defense of "democracy" during the 2020 election and beyond.

Stanford's Rise to Military-Industrial-Academic Complex Powerhouse

Although it bears the name of the railroad magnate who founded the school in 1885, Leland Stanford, the powerhouse university we know of today, represents the vision of another man, Frederick Terman.

The son of a Stanford psychology professor, Terman began his tenure at the campus where he was reared teaching electrical engineering during the 1920s and 1930s. He also harbored ambitions to turn the university and its surrounding area into a major high-tech hub to rival that of MIT on the East Coast.

Like his MIT colleagues, Terman was also deeply connected to the government's budding national security apparatus. During World War II he was tabbed to head Harvard's Radio Research laboratory, established by the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development to develop countermeasures against enemy radars. Through its good work, the lab would save an estimated 800 Allied bomber aircrafts.

Returning to Stanford with the insights and contacts he had developed during the war, Terman took over as the dean of the engineering school in 1946 determined to implement an ambitious plan: to use government funding to erect "steeples of excellence" in critical disciplines that would continually attract new investments in a virtuous cycle that would raise Stanford to preeminence among research institutions.

Terman would win Pentagon contracts to help fund Stanford's Electronics Research Laboratory and the Applied Electronics Laboratory, which included work on classified military programs, bringing Stanford firmly into the military-industrial-academic complex fold. Additional labs – some engaged in basic or theoretical research, and others applied research – followed, deepening the school's ties to the national security state during the Cold War.

While reportedly advising every major branch of the military, Terman cultivated ties with private industry. He encouraged graduates to start firms in nearby communities that would come to be known as Silicon Valley, and urged professors to consult.

In 1951, Terman helped establish the Stanford Industrial Park, a high-tech cooperative on university land that would attract electronics firms and defense contractors – the first such university-owned industrial park in the world. Its tenants would include among others Hewlett-Packard, GE, Eastman Kodak, and a host of other notables, later including the likes of Facebook and Tesla. Lockheed Martin would relocate its Missiles Systems Division to Silicon Valley in 1956 and go on to serve as the largest industrial employer in Silicon Valley during the Cold War.

Under Terman's leadership, first as engineering school dean and then as provost, Stanford and the firms it helped incubate and attract generated advances in everything from microwave electronics and electronic warfare, to missiles and satellites, and semiconductors and computers – meeting the demands of military and civilian consumers alike.

Stuart Leslie, author of "The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial Complex at MIT and Stanford," wrote that "[b]y nearly every measure" Terman achieved his goal of challenging "MIT for leadership" in the sciences. The relationship Terman fostered between the feds and Silicon Valley companies would be responsible for producing "all of the United States Navy's intercontinental ballistic missiles, the bulk of its reconnaissance satellites and tracking systems, and a wide range of microelectronics that became integral components of high-tech weapons and weapons systems" during the Cold War, according to one study.

Leslie Berlin, formerly a historian of the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford University, would write that "All of modern high tech has the US Department of Defense to thank at its core, because this is where the money came from" underwriting research and development.

One Stanford institution to which the money flowed with an indirect link to current controversies regarding social media censorship was the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). Incorporated on campus as a nonprofit in 1946, it would pursue lucrative contracts for often-classified military R&D projects. By 1969, SRI ranked third among think tanks in total value of defense contracts garnered.

Anti-war activists helped force Stanford to divest from the outfit in 1970 – though it would continue to work with government on an array of initiatives. Among them was one building on a Pentagon-backed project to network computers, known as ARPANET. In 1977, an Institute van would transmit data in what is regarded as the first internet connection.

Stanford would open an Office of Technology Licensing in 1970 to manage the university's growing IP portfolio. The office would execute thousands of licenses covering many thousands more inventions – sometimes in tandem with the security state. For example, Google was built in part on National Science Foundation-supported research; its development has also been tied to work done under a joint NSA and CIA grant.

Terrorism Rejuvenates and Transforms the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex

The 9/11 terror attacks in 2001 would reinvigorate and fundamentally transform a military-industrial-academic complex that had demobilized to an extent following the Cold War, during which it had been largely foreign-facing. It would come to see not only foreign clandestine communications but public conversations between Americans promoting disfavored viewpoints as national security concerns.

To combat jihadists, Washington demanded sophisticated new surveillance tools and weapons. When combined with the explosion in communications technology, and the creation of massive new reams of digital data that could be collected and analyzed, Big Tech would prove a natural supplier.

The advent of social media – including Facebook (2004), YouTube (2005), and Twitter (2006) – would significantly impact these efforts.

To the public, social media platforms comprised a digital public square that empowered citizens as journalists and enabled the free flow of ideas and information.

But governments and non-state actors, including terrorist groups, realized they could harness the power of such platforms, and use them for intelligence gathering, waging information warfare, and targeting foes.

Initially U.S. authorities focused almost exclusively on foreign jihadist organizations' exploitation of social media. That began to change when the Obama administration created a series of policies and associated entities – most of which worked closely with Big Tech and academia – targeting a broader array of adversaries.

In 2011, the Obama administration deployed its "Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States" strategy. While identifying Al-Qaeda as "our current priority," the policy broadened the national security apparatus focus to "all types of extremism that leads to violence, regardless of who inspires it."

That same year, the State Department stood up an entity aimed at "supporting agencies in Government-wide public communications activities targeted against violent extremism and terrorist organizations" that in 2016 would morph into the Global Engagement Center (GEC). It would serve as a broader "interagency entity" that would not only partner to build "a global network of positive messengers against violent extremism" including NGOs, but leverage data analytics "from both the public and private sectors to better understand radicalization dynamics online."

Also that year, the Defense Department announced its Social Media in Strategic Communication program, launched to "track ideas and concepts to analyze patterns and cultural narratives" as part of an effort "to develop tools to help identify misinformation or deception campaigns and counter them with truthful information, reducing adversaries' ability to manipulate events." Millions of dollars flowed to both Big Tech and academic hubs in connection with the project.

In conjunction with these programs, the Obama administration also consulted with outside advisors to study how jihadist groups engaged in online disinformation campaigns. Included among the advisors was Renée DiResta, future technical research manager of the Stanford Internet Observatory – which would later play a key role in the government's effort to identify and quell speech disfavored by the government.

With terrorist organizations increasingly exploiting social media platforms to proliferate propaganda and in pursuit of other malign ends, Silicon Valley came to play an increasingly key role in U.S. counterterrorism efforts. As Kara Frederick wrote in a 2019 report for the Center for a New American Security, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media companies:

… hired talent to fill gaps in their counterterrorism expertise, created positions to coordinate and oversee global counterterrorism policy, convened relevant players in internal forums, and instituted a combination of technical measures and good old-fashioned analysis to root out offending users and content. Major and minor tech companies coordinated with each other and with law enforcement to share threat information, drafted policies around preventing terrorist abuse of their platforms, updated their community guidelines, and even supported counter-speech initiatives to offer alternative messaging to terrorist propaganda.

Frederick, now at the Heritage Foundation, would know. A counter-terrorism analyst at the Department of Defense from 2010-16, she departed for Facebook where she helped create and lead its Global Security Counterterrorism Analysis Program.

Facebook's chief security officer during Frederick's tenure, Alex Stamos – future founder of the Stanford Internet Observatory – would boast that "there are several terrorist attacks that you've never heard of because they didn't happen because we caught them ... some local law enforcement agency … took credit for it, but it was actually our team that found it and turned it over to them with a bow on it."

"Once clearly public sector responsibilities," Stamos would add, "are now private sector responsibilities."

Trump's Election Catalyzes the Creation of the Censorship Industrial Complex

With government broadening its focus to domestic violent extremism and its nexus to social media, and a revolving door opening between the national security apparatus and the platforms, Donald Trump's election would prove a catalyzing event in the creation of what critics would describe as the censorship industrial complex.

His victory, which followed Brexit, another populist uprising that stunned Western elites, sent shockwaves from Washington, D.C., to Silicon Valley.

A narrative quickly arose that social media was to blame for Trump's unexpected win. It held that dark forces, especially Russia, had manipulated voters through dishonest posts, and that the platforms enabled Trump's victory through allowing supporters to advance corrosive conspiracy theories.

The national security apparatus sprang to action.

In January 2017, outgoing Obama DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson made protecting election infrastructure part of his agency's mandate. Subsequently:

• DHS would develop a Countering Foreign Influence Task Force focusing on "election infrastructure disinformation."
• The State Department's Global Engagement Center would broaden its interagency mandate to counter foreign influence operations.
• The FBI would establish a Foreign Influence Task Force to "identify and counteract malign foreign influence operations targeting the United States," with an explicit focus on voting and elections.

These key components of what would come to be known as the censorship industrial complex – one that would ultimately target the speech of Trump's own supporters and the president himself – emerged at the very time he was fending off the Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy theory that gave rise to them.

Government concerns over foreign meddling in domestic politics would drive demand for putatively private sector actors, often with extensive government ties and funding, to engage in what the NGOs cast as research and analysis of such malign operations on social media.

In 2018, the Senate Select Intelligence Committee would solicit research, including from DiResta, on Russia's social media meddling – research that would bolster something of a pressure campaign against social media companies to get them to quit dithering on content moderation.

The committee also commissioned Graphika, a social media analytics firm founded in 2013, to co-author a report on Russian social media meddling. Graphika lists DARPA and the Department of Defense's Minerva Initiative, which funds "basic social science research," on a company website detailing its clients and research partners. It would serve as one of the four partners that would comprise the Stanford Internet Observatory-led Election Integrity Partnership – a key cog in government-driven speech policing during and after the 2020 election.

Another entity that would join the Stanford-led quartet is the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, established in 2016. Funded in part by the Departments of State – including through the Global Engagement Center – and Energy, the think-tank counts among its directors CIA chiefs and Defense secretaries. The lab's senior director is Graham Bookie, a former top aide to President Obama on cybersecurity, counterterrorism, intelligence, and homeland security issues. In 2018, Facebook announced an election partnership with the lab wherein the two parties would work on "emerging threats and disinformation campaigns from around the world."

The third of four entities later to join the Election Integrity Partnership was the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public, formed in 2019. Stanford grad and visiting professor Kate Starbird co-founded the Center. The National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research have provided funding for Dr. Starbird's social media work.

That same year, the Stanford Internet Observatory emerged. Founded by Alex Stamos, who had led substantial research on Russia's social media operations while Chief Security Officer at Facebook and routinely interfaced with national security agencies throughout his cybersecurity career, the Observatory would serve as a "cross-disciplinary initiative comprised of research, teaching and policy engagement addressing the abuse of today's information technologies, with a particular focus on social media … includ[ing] the spread of disinformation, cybersecurity breaches, and terrorist propaganda."

The Observatory is a program of Stanford's Cyber Policy Center, which counts former Obama National Security Council official and Russian Ambassador Michael McFaul, among other notables on the faculty list with backgrounds in or ties to the security state.

Stamos stood up the Observatory with a $5 million gift from Craig Newmark Philanthropies – which also gave $1 million to Starbird's work. The Craigslist founder's charitable vehicle contributed some $170 million to "journalism, countering harassment against journalists, cybersecurity and election integrity," between 2016 and 2020, areas he argued constituted the "battle spaces" of information warfare – information warfare waged implicitly against President Trump and his supporters.

The National Science Foundation also provided large infusions of money to the sprawling network of academic entities, for-profit firms, and think tanks that would emerge in the "counter-disinformation space."

This network produced a mass of research and analysis redefining and expanding the perceived threat of free and open social media. It argued America was plagued by a pandemic of "misinformation," "disinformation," and "malinformation," with a nexus to domestic violent extremism that could be created and disseminated by almost anyone – thereby making everyone a potential target for surveillance and censorship.

Ideas authorities found troubling would come to be treated as tantamount to national security threats to be neutralized – as the future Biden administration would codify in the first-of-its-kind National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism.

DiResta described this paradigm shift in a 2018 article for Just Security – a publication incidentally also funded by Newmark.

"Disinformation, misinformation, and social media hoaxes have evolved from a nuisance into high-stakes information war," DiResta wrote.

She continued:

…Traditional analysis of propaganda and disinformation has focused fairly narrowly on understanding the perpetrators and trying to fact-check the narratives (fight narratives with counter-narratives, fight speech with more speech). Today's information operations, however, are … computational. They're driven by algorithms and are conducted with unprecedented scale and efficiency. … It's time to change our way of thinking about propaganda and disinformation: it's not a truth-in-narrative issue, it's an adversarial attack in the information space. Info ops are a cybersecurity issue.

This re-definition of what arguably amounts to speech policing of social media as security policy could be seen a year later when NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg urged that "NATO must remain prepared for both conventional and hybrid threats: From tanks to tweets." (Emphasis RCI's)

The Censorship Industrial Complex Mobilizes for the 2020 Election

In the run-up to the 2020 election, DHS' Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which took as its mandate protecting election infrastructure, would expand its focus to include combatting misinformation and disinformation perceived as threatening the security of elections – regardless of its source. This would ultimately encompass the protected political speech of Americans, including speculation and even satire to the extent it called into question or undermined state-approved narratives about an unprecedented mass mail-in election.

Social media companies, chastened after having come under withering political and media attack for their content moderation policies during the 2016 election, would recruit dozens of ex-security state officials to fill their "Trust and Safety" teams dealing with policing speech to likewise combat this purported threat.

Frederick told RealClearInvestigations that Silicon Valley leaders believed the teams' past focus on Islamic terror, which receded under Trump, reflected a bias, requiring platforms to "reorient toward domestic extremism" – the new target of the political establishment.

Combining the platforms' political leanings with the tools they had developed to take on jihadists, in Frederick's words, would create a "powder keg" threatening to obliterate Americans' speech.

Still, the Constitution stood in the way to the extent the government wanted to police the platforms' speech. In the run-up to the 2020 election, both federal authorities and like-minded NGOs recognized a "gap:" No federal agency had "a focus on, or authority regarding, [identifying and targeting for suppression] election misinformation originating from domestic sources," as the Stanford Internet Observatory-led Election Integrity Partnership would put it. DiResta acknowledged any such project faced "very real First Amendment questions."

In response, the government helped create a workaround via that very Election Integrity Partnership – a government driven,  advised, and coordinated enterprise run by NGOs to surreptitiously surveil and seek to censor speech that did not comport with government-favored narratives on election administration and outcomes.

One hundred days from the 2020 election, the Stanford Internet Observatory, alongside Graphika, the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, and University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public launched the EIP as a "model for whole-of-society collaboration," aimed at "defending the 2020 election against voting-related mis- and disinformation."

As RCI previously reported, the project had two main objectives:

First, EIP lobbied social media companies, with some success, to adopt more stringent moderation policies around "content intended to suppress voting, reduce participation, confuse voters as to election processes, or delegitimize election results without evidence. …

Second, EIP surveilled hundreds of millions of social media posts for content that might violate the platforms' moderation policies. In addition to identifying this content internally, EIP also collected content forwarded to it by external "stakeholders," including government offices and civil society groups. EIP then flagged this mass of content to the platforms for potential suppression.

As many as 120 analysts, records show, created tickets identifying social media content they deemed objectionable. They forwarded many tickets to officials at platforms including Google, Twitter, and Facebook which "labeled, removed, or soft blocked" thousands of unique URLs – content shared millions of times.

An RCI review of the nearly 400 of those tickets produced to the House Homeland Security Committee found that government agencies – including entities within the FBI, DHS (CISA), and State Department (GEC) – involved themselves in nearly a quarter of the censorship tickets. Those tickets almost uniformly covered domestic speech, and from the political right; in dozens of instances, the project made "recommendations" to social media companies to take action.

The tickets RCI reviewed illustrated the project's efforts to push social media platforms to silence President Trump and other elected officials.

One EIP analyst would say of the effort that it "was probably the closest we've come to actually preempting misinformation before it goes viral."

In response to RCI's inquiries in connection with this story, CISA Executive Director Brandon Wales shared a statement reading in part: "CISA does not and has never censored speech or facilitated censorship. Such allegations are riddled with factual inaccuracies."

Given "concerns from election officials of all parties regarding foreign influence operations and disinformation that may impact the security of election infrastructure," Wales said, "CISA mitigates the risk of disinformation by sharing information on election security with the public and by amplifying the trusted voices of election officials across the nation" – work he indicated is conducted while protecting Americans' liberties.

Dr. Starbird told RCI that:

Falsehoods about elections - whether accidental rumors about when and how to vote or intentional disinformation campaigns meant to sow distrust in election results - are issues that cut to the core of our democracy. Identifying and communicating about these issues isn't partisan and, despite an ongoing campaign to label this work as such, isn't 'censorship.'

The Censorship Industrial Complex Persists Despite Scrutiny

All had come full circle. Stanford had once again connected the security state to Silicon Valley for a project involving both basic and applied research aimed at perceived foes – studying how narratives emerged, and then seeking to get offending ones purged.

That project would again garner new funding from the security state in the form of a $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation split between the Stanford Internet Observatory and the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public for "rapid-response research to mitigate online disinformation." Their partners in the EIP would receive millions more from the federal government under the Biden administration.

The relationship between DHS' Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and EIP would only grow. As RCI reported:

In the days following Nov. 3, 2020, with President Trump challenging the integrity of the election results, CISA rebuked him in a statement, calling the election "the most secure in American history." The president would go on to fire CISA's director, Christopher Krebs, by tweet.

Almost immediately thereafter, Krebs and Stamos would form a consultancy, the Krebs Stamos Group. In March 2021, Krebs would participate in a "fireside chat" when EIP launched its 2020 report.

CISA's top 2020 election official, Matt Masterson, joined SIO as a fellow after leaving CISA in January 2021. Krebs' successor at CISA, Director Jen Easterly, would appoint Stamos to the sub-agency's Cybersecurity Advisory Committee, established in 2021, for a term set to expire this month.

Director Easterly would appoint Kate Starbird … to the committee. Starbird chaired the advisory committee's since-abolished MDM (Mis-, Dis-, and Mal-Information) Subcommittee, focusing on information threats to infrastructure beyond elections.

SIO's DiResta served as a subject matter expert for the now-defunct subcommittee. DHS scrapped the entity in the wake of the public furor over DHS' now-shelved "Disinformation Governance Board."

Starbird, her University of Washington colleagues, and a former student member of the Stanford Internet Observatory who had matriculated to the Krebs Stamos Group would publish a report in June 2022 building on their EIP efforts, titled "Repeat Spreaders and Election Delegitimization: A Comprehensive Dataset of Misinformation Tweets from the 2020 U.S. Election." Its publication coincided with, and seemed aimed at buttressing the partisan House January 6 Select Committee's second public hearing.

Documents obtained via FOIA from the University of Washington and recently published by Matt Taibbi's Racket News and Substacker UndeadFOIA, suggest the committee's chief data scientist met with Starbird and DiResta in January of that year to discuss the report the EIP produced following the 2020 election and its underlying data – a report that linked mis-, dis-, and mal-information regarding the 2020 election to the capitol riot.

In the interim, EIP would morph into the Virality Project, which would be used to target dissent from public health authorities during the COVID-19 pandemic – dissent those authorities argued could lead people to die, as dissenting views on the 2020 election spurred the capitol riot.

Among those targeted by the government for silencing, and who social media companies would censor, in part for his opposition to broad pandemic lockdowns, was Stanford's own Dr. Jay Bhattacharya – one plaintiff in Murthy v. Missouri (Dr. Bhattacharya and Taibbi were recipients of RealClear's first annual Samizdat Prize honoring those committed to truth and free speech). As he sees it, the Virality Project helped "launder" a "government … hit list for censorship," which he finds "absolutely shocking" and at odds with the Stanford's past commitments to academic freedom and general "sort of countercultural opposition to government overreach."

As chilling as these efforts were, a House Homeland Security Committee aide told RCI:

EIP and VP were largely comprised of college interns running basic Google searches. Imagine a similar effort leveraging artificial intelligence to sweep up and censor ever greater swaths of our online conversations. We are at the beginning of the problem, not the end, which is why it is so vital to get right today because without action, tomorrow could be far worse.

It is unclear whether such action is forthcoming. Oral arguments in Murthy, heard this past March, suggested the Supremes may diverge from the lower courts. A federal district court found, and an appellate court concurred in the view that in coordinating and colluding with third parties and social media companies to suppress disfavored speech, government agencies had likely violated the First Amendment. Those courts barred such contact between agencies and social media companies during the pendency of the case – an injunction the nation's highest court stayed over the objections of Justices Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch.

At least one companion case targeting the likes of the Stanford Internet Observatory, and its Election Integrity Partnership and Virality Project as co-conspirators with the federal government in violating Americans' speech, Hines v. Stamos, is pending.

GOP legislation to deter and/or defund the activities illustrated in these cases has languished in Congress, but oversight efforts have raised the cost for NGOs to continue partnering with the government.

When asked in June 2023 about the Stanford Internet Observatory's future plans, Stamos told the House Judiciary Committee, which has been probing alleged public-private censorship efforts, that "Since this investigation has cost the university now approaching seven figures legal fees, it's been pretty successful I think in discouraging us from making it worthwhile for us to do a study in 2024."

Bhattacharya responded in an interview with RCI, "Why is Stanford putting so much of its institutional energy into [defending] this [the Observatory]?"

"It seems like they are putting their thumbs on the scale partly because they're so closely connected with government entities."

Months later, according to his LinkedIn profile, Stamos would depart from the Observatory, while remaining a part-time Stanford Adjunct and Lecturer in Computer Science.

On the eve of oral arguments in the Murthy case, Stanford University and its observatory castigated critics for promoting "false, inaccurate, misleading, and manufactured claims" regarding its "role in researching and analyzing social media content about U.S. elections and the COVID-19 vaccine."

Stanford called on the Supreme Court to "affirm its right to share its research and views with the government and social media companies."

It vowed the Internet Observatory would continue its work on "influence operations."

Starbird has echoed Stanford. In response to a series of questions from Taibbi pertaining to the trove of FOIA'd documents Racket obtained, she said:

Our team has fielded dozens of public records requests, producing thousands of emails. Not one confirms the central claims of your thesis falsely alleging coordination with government and platforms to "censor" social media content. But, instead of acknowledging that fact, abuse continues of the Washington State public records law to smear and spread falsehoods based on willful misreadings of innocuous emails, ignorance about scientific research, and, in several instances, a lack of reading comprehension.

She too vowed that: "At the Center for an Informed Public, our research into online rumoring about election procedures and our work to rapidly identify and communicate about harmful election rumors will continue in 2024."

Stanford's Internet Observatory and the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public will not be spearheading the Election Integrity Partnership for 2024 or future election cycles however, per a link to the EIP's website to which a Stanford spokesperson referred RCI in sole response to our queries.

Some experts are doubtful alleged social media censorship is going away anytime soon. "I don't know how to ‘put the genie back in the bottle,'" said Frederick.

"There's a thing about intel analysts in general where you have a sense of superiority because you have access to things that the plebes don't. But, you know, these people have taken their G-d complexes to the next level and turned it against their neighbor."

Of the alleged speech police, she said "they're drunk with power obviously and they think they know what's best for us."

Amb. Alberto Fernandez, vice president at MEMRI and a former leader of the precursor to the State Department's GEC, an observatory stakeholder that had itself funded adjacent efforts, told RCI "there needs to be transparency and preferably, a ‘firewall' of some sort between the Feds and social media."

In May, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner (D-Va.) – who had himself submitted an amicus brief siding with the agencies in the case, contra Republican colleagues led by House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan – revealed that in the wake of the oral arguments in Murthy, federal agencies had resumed communications with social media companies.

Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.), who had originally brought the Murthy case as Missouri attorney general, replied: "It appears DHS, FBI and potentially other agencies are quietly ramping up their efforts to censor Constitutionally protected speech ahead of the 2024 election."

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The American Center for Law and Justice has declared a victory in its fight for a public school teacher who was told it was illegal for her to pray where students could see her – even in a parking lot.

The fight involves teacher Staci Barber and the Katy, Texas, Independent School District.

The ACLU said the judge hearing the case ruled "that since the school has updated its policy in response to our demand letter," there now is no "language in the Employee Handbook that explicitly prohibits praying in the presence of students."

The legal team reported, "It is a tremendous win for our client because she can now pray when she desires as this case continues to trial."

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District officials had hauled the teacher "into her principal's office" for gathering with two friends and fellow teachers to pray at a school flagpole earlier.

School officials claimed then "it was against the law" for them to pray "where students could see them."

Faced with the ACLJ's challenge, the district "removed some language from its policy."

But, the legal team said, "our client was still unable to engage in any prayer in the presence of students or to pray publicly, even off the clock, when she was on school grounds."

The result was a lawsuit that was filed, and the resulting court decision at a preliminary point in the resolution of the case.

When the case was developing, WND reported the case lists as defendants the district and Bryan Rounds, a principal at Cardiff junior high.

The ACLJ pointed out, "Every year millions of people gather at school flag poles to pray before the school day begins. The ACLJ is very proud to stand in support of See You At The Pole, a prayer rally for students and participating adults to lift up their schools in prayer. Our client has prayed at the pole every year on behalf of her students.

"This year she had gathered with two friends and fellow teachers to pray at the school flagpole. The school principal called these teachers into his office. He told them that they could not pray at the pole or in the presence of students because if they did so, students may see and join in. He told them that it was against the law for them to pray publicly where students could see them and then pointed them to a school policy that prohibited teachers from praying in the presence of students."

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(ZEROHEDGE) – One Arizona high school teach is resigning over his students' addictions...to their phones. The constant use of smartphones in his classroom has driven Sahuaro High School’s Mitchell Rutherford to tell Fox News last week that he is "giving up" being a biology teacher because he can't control phone usage.

"I have been struggling with mental health this year mostly because of what I identified as basically phone addiction with the students," he commented.

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After being a teacher for 11 years, he has resigned. He said last week that he has implemented a "variety of lesson plans" to try and make it clear to his students the negative effects of constant phone usage. "Here's extra credit, let's check your screen time, let's create habits, let's do a unit on sleep and why sleep is important and how to reduce your phone usage for a bedtime routine, and we talked about it every day and created a basket called ‘phone jail,’" he told Fox News.

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(THE COLLEGE FIX) – Students who sued the University of Chicago for tuition refunds due to COVID-19 closures have reached a nearly $5 million settlement agreement with the school.

The private Illinois university finalized the class-action lawsuit settlement with the students last week, agreeing to pay $4.95 million, according to the Chicago Sun Times.

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Students affected by the university’s 2020 decision to switch to online classes due to COVID-19 could receive $25 or more from the settlement, the report states.

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(NEW YORK POST) – Ezra Toczek, 5, got more than a gold star from his preschool teacher — he received a liver. The young child was put on the transplant list in February after being diagnosed with end-stage liver disease, and subsequent liver failure, as a result of damage to the organ suffered at birth.

But in March, his former preschool teacher Carissa Fisher applied to become a living donor — someone who is healthy and donates an organ or a part of an organ to someone in need of one — after hearing of Ezra’s condition. Last week, she learned she had been approved.

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On Saturday, May 25, Fisher arrived at the Toczek family’s Western New York home to deliver the good news in person, with a stuffed animal, balloons and a handmade sign in tow.

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(NEW YORK POST) – Bruhat Soma was unbeatable before he arrived at the Scripps National Spelling Bee, and neither the dictionary, nor his competitors, nor a lightning-round tiebreaker challenged him on the way to victory.

Bruhat spelled 29 words correctly in the tiebreaker, beating Faizan Zaki by nine, to win the title on Thursday night. He receives a trophy and more than $50,000 in cash and prizes. The 12-year-old seventh-grader from Tampa, Florida, had won three consecutive bees before taking the stage at a convention center outside Washington for the most prestigious spelling competition in the English language.

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“I always want to win. And this was, like, my main goal,” Bruhat said. “It didn’t matter if I won all those other bees. This is what I was aiming for. So I’m just really happy that I won this.”

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Sen. Fetterman in Harvard hood

(NEW YORK POST) – Sen. John Fetterman told Yeshiva University graduates Wednesday that he was “profoundly disappointed” in Harvard University’s inability to address antisemitism on campus before removing the ceremonial crimson academic hood representing his alma mater.

The Pennsylvania Democrat expressed his disapproval of the Ivy League school during his commencement address at the private Orthodox Jewish university, which bestowed on him its “Hero of Israel” award, the institution’s highest honor.

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“I have been profoundly disappointed [in] Harvard’s inability to stand up for the Jewish community after Oct. 7,” Fetterman, 54, told the new grads at Louis Armstrong Stadium in Queens.

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